Kyrie

Ellen Bryant Voigt’s book of poems, titled Kyrie, is a poignant and troubling work. Each poem in the collection is its own emotional trip. However, the poem that I found most fascinating and spoke to me the most begins with “Oh yes I used to pray” (43). The poem seems to revolve around the birth of a child that went wrong, possibly a miscarriage or a stillbirth. The poem retains an interestingly straightforward structure, as there is only one stanza and no apparent rhyme scheme. The first few lines contain the literary technique of repetition with the phrase, “I prayed…” Following the first line “Oh yes I used to pray,” this use of repetition evokes the feeling of hopelessness and puts in the mind of the reader a picture of a helpless mother, crying desperately for the salvation of her child. Though not demarcated by any physical breaks in the format of the poem, the second section is about the narrator’s “nearest neighbors,” who were also sick in some way and whose prayers the narrator emulated when she prayed for her own child. Both the neighbors and the narrator prayed in the same fashion, “heads down, hands wrung, knees on the hard floor.”

Ironically, only the neighbors “survived” as a result of their prayers to “the Merciful Father.” And with that, the narrator asks, “…do you think they’re still praying?”  Finally, in the last two lines of the poem, the reader discovers that the actual reason for the suffering was a stillbirth: “She was so tiny, we kept her in a shoebox on the cookstove, like a kitten.”

This poem tackles a number of themes and emotions. First off, it retains an incredible feeling of hopelessness from the beginning until the end. There is no resolve for the horror and the suffering. Furthermore, the poem not only raises the question of prayer as a useless activity, but also suggests the seemingly arbitrary nature of life events. According to the narrator, it is perplexing why her “nearest neighbors” survived their hardships while she (and her child) did not.

This poem speaks out to me so powerfully mainly because of the voice within. As a poet and an artist, I am, for some reason, extremely interested in the plight of mothers. So, every time I read this poem, I hear a mother’s voice in my head, but it isn’t crying. It isn’t hoarse from all the nights of wailing. It isn’t angry or frustrated with the way things played out. There is an underlying tone of acceptance throughout the poem, and that is the most haunting part. It sounds like that the poem was written years and years after the incident and after the mother has time to process what has happened and been able to move on. But yet, you and I know that she hasn’t gotten over it. There is no way she could have. She still thinks about it every second of her life. She still weeps to herself at night.