In Defense of “Candelabra with Heads” by Nicole Sealey

In Defense of “Candelabra with Heads”

If you’ve read the “Candelabra with Heads”

that appears in this collection and the one

in The Animal, thank you. The original,

the one included here, is an example, I’m told,

of a poem that can speak for itself, but loses

faith in its ability to do so by ending with a thesis

question. Yeats said a poem should click shut

like a well-made box. I don’t disagree.

I ask, “Who can see this and not see lynchings?”

not because I don’t trust you, dear reader,

or my own abilities. I ask because the imagination

would have us believe, much like faith, faith

the original “Candelabra” lacks, in things unseen.

You should know that human limbs burn

like branches and branches like human limbs.

Only after man began hanging man from trees

then setting him on fire, which would jump

from limb to branch like a bastard species

of bird, did we come to know such things.

A hundred years from now, October 9, 2116,

8:18 p.m., when all but the lucky are good

and dead, may someone happen upon the question

in question. May that lucky someone be black

and so far removed from the verb lynch that she be

dumbfounded by its meaning. May she then

call up Hirschhorn’s Candelabra with Heads.

May her imagination, not her memory, run wild.