Marcellus Williams' "At Last...Another Heartbeat"

Thoughts on taking each other seriously.

At Last…Another Heartbeat

the silhouettes of their bond visible still at the last glow of the sun
they experience each other and the life of the night as it begins to stir
standing there in silence holding hands
no rush to go back inside
there is so much beauty and comfort in being in love and just being…
—amidst sounds of buzzing
chirps
crickets
the pleasant but irregular blowing of the wind
fireflies dancing in step with the light of the moon
how strange it is to become aware of another’s heartbeat but forget one’s own—
finally love.



from Perspectives and Emotions (link here)

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There is a moment in George Jackson’s Soledad Brother — a compilation of letters written by Jackson while imprisoned, which is also where he died, killed by prison guards — where he writes:

I refuse to let myself be punished with stuff like this. Locked in jail, within a jail, my mind is still free. I refuse ever to allow myself to be forced by living conditions into a response that is not commensurate with intelligence and my final objective.

Three years earlier, in a letter to his father, Jackson wrote:

I used to find enjoyment in a walk in the rain, summer evenings in a place like Harrisburg. Remember how I used to love Harrisburg. All of this is gone from me, all the gentle, shy characteristics of the black men have been wrung unceremoniously from my soul.

I think of these moments when I think of today’s poem, which was written by Marcellus Williams, who was executed by the state of Missouri on September 24th. You can find some words about Williams’ poetry here, published by The Innocence Project, an organization devoted to overturning wrongful convictions and freeing the innocent. In the aftermath of Williams’ execution, they issued a statement that read, in part:

Mr. Williams’ story echoes that of too many others caught in our country’s broken criminal legal system. A Black man convicted of killing a white woman, Mr. Williams maintained his innocence until the very end. His conviction was based on the testimony of two eyewitnesses who were paid for their testimony. No DNA evidence linked him to the crime. And the current St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney acknowledged that errors made by the trial prosecutors – including mishandling the murder weapon and intentionally excluding Black prospective jurors in violation of the Constitution – contributed to a wrongful conviction.

Nonetheless, the Missouri Attorney General’s Office relentlessly pursued Mr. Williams’ execution and opposed clemency. The Attorney General and Missouri Governor Mike Parson – who ultimately denied the request for clemency – ignored the wishes of the victim’s husband who has consistently made clear that he opposed the death penalty for Mr. Williams.

It is impossible for me — as I hope and imagine that it is for you — to read today’s poem and think of its author being sentenced to death, and to think, too, of such a sentence being carried out. But such things happened, with the stoic matter-of-factness that characterizes some of the most gruesome actions of this country and this world. And yet, it still feels impossible to imagine the gentleness at the heart of this poem, a gentleness that is brought upon by careful and care-filled attention, no longer existing on this earth anymore. Because it is gentleness, isn’t it? It is gentleness that might make someone write these lines:

chirps
crickets
the pleasant but irregular blowing of the wind
fireflies dancing in step with the light of the moon

And so I think of George Jackson’s assertion that his own gentleness — “all [his] gentle, shy characteristics” — had been taken from him in prison. And I think, too, of his assertion, years later, that his “mind is still free.” And I think, too, of him no longer being alive.

Since Marcellus Williams’ death, and yet not before it, which is my own failing, I’ve been spending time with what poetry I can find of his online. And so, I want to take time today to take his poetry seriously, to consider it and to offer attention to it, especially because of the fact that his life — as viewed by this country — was not taken seriously at all. That is part of what murder is: carelessness enacted, with intention.

There’s a short poem by Jane Hirshfield, “Late Prayer,” that reads, in full:

Tenderness does not choose its own uses.
It goes out to everything equally,
circling rabbit and hawk.
Look:  in the iron bucket,
a single soul, a single ruby —
all the heavens and hells.
They rattle in the heart and make one sound.

I think of Hirshfield when I think of Williams’ work today, because I see them in conversation with each other. I see Williams looking at the world in some late hour, and making out of such looking a poem. And I see the tenderness in both. And how it — some great, beautiful equalizer — goes out to all that both poets offer their attention towards.

Here is an absolute favorite poem by Izumi Shikibu, translated by Hirshfield, that also does that same work:

Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.

When I read Williams write of becoming “aware of another’s heartbeat but forget[ting] one’s own,” I think of the final line of Hirshfield’s poem above — the “one sound” she allows her poem to make out of the world. Isn’t that sensation of awareness that Williams writes about a kind of recognition of oneness? Isn’t that the world becoming one sound? And when I read Williams looking out into the “last glow of the sun,” I feel him doing the same kind of awareness-driven work as Shikibu above. I feel him seeing the moonlight leaking “between the roof planks / of this ruined house.”

Notice, too, how Williams’ poem begins with these long lines and then how, almost abruptly, such long lines shorten into the litany of noticings that I mentioned above:

—amidst sounds of buzzing
chirps
crickets
the pleasant but irregular blowing of the wind

Isn’t this kind of shortening — powerful, abrupt, microscopic — almost like an enactment of Shikibu’s moonlight? The way it leaks through the poem? The way these sounds, these feelings, these things noticed and observed and seen, give light to what we know, while reading this, to be the case — that this poem was written from its own ruined house, and not even a house, but a prison? And so I read this poem today, and I feel an enormous sense of gratitude for it. But I also feel a deep sense of rage. And frustration. And anger. I feel such things for the way we often privilege who we take seriously, and for what. And, in doing so, we deny people the capacity, quite simply, to live. And we deny them the capacity to be taken seriously as poets and artists. As dreamers and thinkers. Which is not all of what it means to live. But part of it. A beautiful part of it.

As I read today’s poem, I think of how one of my favorite aspects of reading poets is reading them in entirety — from early in their careers until later in life. And there is something that often happens, as poets write into the lateness of their lives. They turn, so often, toward light, and toward a kind of oneness that offering attention to light inspires.

For example, here’s the final stanza of Galway Kinnell’s “Astonishment,” written well into the lateness of his life:

On the mountain tonight the full moon
faces the full sun. Now could be the moment
when we fall apart or we become whole.
Our time seems to be up—I think I even hear it stopping.
Then why have we kept up the singing for so long?
Because that’s the sort of determined creature we are.
Before us, our first task is to astonish,
and then, harder by far, to be astonished.

And, in Marie Howe’s New and Selected Poems, which I’ve been reading (with so much love) lately, I have noticed this kind of shift toward light in her most recently-written poems, which are also, in the context of her life, her latest poems.

Here’s some lines from “Practicing”:

The sunlight enters the small kitchen
spilling across the white enamel table

and the chipped blue wooden chair
whether anyone is there to see it, or not.

And here, too, some lines from “The Maples”:

Stand still, I thought,
See how long you can bear that.

Try to stand still, if only for a few moments,
drinking light    breathing.

And here, finally, some lines from “Postscript”:

Few of us knew what the bird calls meant
or what the fires were saying.

These are beautiful moments in beautiful poems.

And now, reading them, I can’t help but think that Williams’ poem today does the same kind of work. It stands still. It drinks light. It certainly breathes. It astonishes. It keeps up the singing. It moves itself toward an attempt at understanding what all of this might mean. And it does so from a place so wildly and awfully and tragically unimaginative: a prison. It sits in the midst of that place and does the hard work of seeing and looking and thinking and caring and imagining. Isn’t that a poem we should take seriously? In the aftermath of his killing, which was, in effect, an enactment of how little anyone with power took his voice or his life seriously, I hope we take his work — and the work of all of those who are writing from the margins of society — seriously.

As George Jackson writes in Soledad Brother:

If we can reach each other through all of this, fences, fear, concrete, steel, barbed wire, guns, then history will commend us for a great victory won.

Something awful will continue to happen if we don’t reach each other. And something awful will continue to happen if we don’t take each other seriously. And something awful will continue to happen if we stay more focused on these ideas of innocence and perceived worth — these ideas that our culture and our society privilege — than on being more acutely and compassionately and patiently aware of one another. Something awful will continue to happen if we continue to do the easy work of passing judgement, judgement — however improper, quick, sharp, and ill-informed — that condemns people to misery and death, rather than investing more in the harder work of seeing, really and actually seeing people.

I think of how, outside the school where I teach, which is located in the poorest congressional district in the country, which is located in the South Bronx, there is a recycling return center. I walk past it every morning on my way to work. Most mornings, it isn’t open yet, and still, most mornings, there’s a crowd of people waiting to return the cans they’ve gathered in exchange for — I’m not sure how much — money. They stand there, a few of them, and some mornings, maybe a dozen, with shopping carts filled with hundreds of bottles, with plastic bags of cans bungee-tied together. And I think about it often now — how the most marginalized among us are actually doing the real work of making this world better, in some perhaps small but certainly tangible way. You might say they’re doing it for money, for cash. Okay. But they’re doing what we’ve failed to do — in this case, recycling on a mass scale — relentlessly.

And I think of how Marcellus Williams wrote, in his poem “The Net Zero/Morality Equation,” the following lines:

behold the carbon footprint and its manifest distorted body

plaguing and distracting minds with self-inflicted anxiety

with a cognizant-dissonant actuality

along with consumer insatiability

Again, from a place designed to ruin and punish people, a place devoid of imagination or care or thought, Williams thought, not just of himself, but of the world, a world he had very little hope of ever returning into. And he thought of what was destroying it. And he named it all, with a great deal of precision. He named the pain and the difficulty and the consequences. He named so much that he didn’t have to. He did that work, which is a poet’s work and a person’s work. It’s work I fail to do often. But he did it.

I think, too, of what continues to happen in Palestine. And now in Lebanon. And I think of how Williams extended his solidarity to such causes in one poem, where he writes:

in the face of apex arrogance
and ethnic cleansing by any definition...
still your laughter can be heard
and somehow you are able to smile
O resilient Children of Palestine!

When I witness solidarity extended from a place such as a prison, it reminds me that the work of solidarity, though difficult, is possible. It must be. If it is possible from a position of strained hope, it must be possible from a position where hope is, at least, a thing we can muster up, even if the world feels like an endless barrage of difficulty. I think I have a duty to hope. And to imagine. And maybe you think so, too. And when I read Williams’ work, I am reminded to hold that really, really close, to remember what David Graeber wrote:

The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.

Marcellus Williams does not deserve that different world because he wrote a beautiful poem. He deserves it because he simply does. As so many do. But today’s poem reminds me of how Ross Gay interprets that quote of Auden’s — on poetry making “nothing happen.” As Gay reads it, that quote means that poetry allows for nothing — the very fact of nothing — to happen. Instead of what? Instead of all that fills such nothing, so often. Like violence. Or productivity. Or the algorithmic void at work behind the scenes. Today’s poem brings us back to the nothing. That space of light, where we are finally aware, and finally in love with each other. It’s a space where killing doesn’t happen. It’s a space where people are still alive. It’s this world. Or, at least, it could be. But we have to work to see it. Today’s poem shows us how. I’m grateful for it. And angry about so much else.

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Some ongoing notes:

1. You can read a short book — Perspectives and Emotions — of Marcellus Williams’ poetry here.

2. If you feel moved, you can donate to the Midwest Innocence Project, which worked to free Marcellus Williams, here. You can donate to the wider-reaching Innocence Project here.

3. I started following Workshops 4 Gaza, an organization of writers putting together donation-based writing workshops and readings in support of Palestine. You can follow them here and get more information about them here.

4. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.