When Roe v Wade was overturned and women lost dominion over their own bodies when a constitutional right was taken away from them, I was angry and sad and frightened. When I am that upset, I turn to words to calm me -either writing them or reading them. When I was taking a walk and contemplating how we had gotten to this point in this country and how we have to live with this Supreme Court asserting raw radical power against the wishes of the majority of Americans, I remembered this poem by Robert Lowell because of its last line. He didn’t write it about the Roberts Court but it now has even more resonance.
(ROBERT LOWELL PHOTOGRAPHED BY ALFRED EISENSTAEDT/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES.
July in Washington
BY ROBERT LOWELL
The stiff spokes of this wheel
touch the sore spots of the earth.
On the Potomac, swan-white
power launches keep breasting the sulphurous wave.
Otters slide and dive and slick back their hair,
raccoons clean their meat in the creek.
On the circles, green statues ride like South American
liberators above the breeding vegetation—
prongs and spearheads of some equatorial
backland that will inherit the globe.
The elect, the elected . . . they come here bright as dimes,
and die dishevelled and soft.
We cannot name their names, or number their dates—
circle on circle, like rings on a tree—
but we wish the river had another shore,
some further range of delectable mountains,
distant hills powdered blue as a girl’s eyelid.
It seems the least little shove would land us there,
that only the slightest repugnance of our bodies
we no longer control could drag us back.