VOICE
The violinist gives the tuning peg a twist.
Wound up too tight, the string will stretch and curl and break.
The fiddler learns to play without the string she’s missed.
A man may grab and hold a woman by the wrist.
He’s learned to think a woman lives for him to take.
He pushes, pulls her clothes, and gives her arm a twist.
She buckles, falls. She fears the hand that turns to fist.
The night becomes nightmare from which she’ll never wake.
The fiddler learns to play without the string she’s missed.
She learns to live: her past has formed a hard-shelled cyst.
She speaks of everything except the inner ache.
And each time he denies, he gives the knife a twist.
His story: it was just a silly teenage tryst.
Hers is a muted instrument, she cannot speak.
The fiddler learns to play without the string she’s missed.
And then she speaks of everything. She will insist
that she is whole, she speaks for her and others’ sake.
The violinist gives the tuning peg a twist.
The fiddler learns to play without the string she’s missed.
—from Rattle #65, Fall 2019
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Ruth Cassel Hoffman: “Poets like to talk about how there must be tension in a poem—thus the central image in this poem. This one had been cooking for some time, but the catalyst was, of course, the testimony of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and Judge Brett Kavanaugh. I have been angry, anxious, sad, and finally galvanized into my best form of action by the #MeToo movement. As a woman, I have had sometimes to fight to be heard. I’m one of the lucky ones, so this poem is not for me but for Dr. Blasey Ford and all the others.” (web)
