Mothers of the Executed
NOTE FROM THE EDITOR: Walter Long is an Austin, Texas, attorney and the founder of the Texas After Violence Project (TAVP). To learn more about this organization & its work, read this folio’s featured interview with TAVP’s current Executive Director, Gabriel Solís.
By nature we are emotionally warm, compassionate creatures. Human culture might reasonably be described as a holding space we build for one another—out of stone, wood, metal, as well as language—where we hope that the greatest number of us might have equal access to mutual security. Although this holding space is our communal answer to existential fear, it always exists under fear’s sway, so it always is vulnerable to acute or chronic breakdowns. Breakdowns occur when our holding spaces become tightened around a few, excluding others from safety and the sense of safety.
We might regard the Argentine military junta in the 1970s and 1980s as a comparatively abrupt and brief breakdown that tightened security around a powerful few through the threat and employment of homicide against others. Marjorie Agosin spent time with the mothers of persons “disappeared” by that junta and she conveyed the mothers’ emotional lives, their experience under breakdown, in a series of poems. Her works inspired me to write a dozen poems (two of them here) sharing the emotional lives of the mothers of the executed in Texas—the facts reflected in each poem having been given me directly or recorded in a Texas After Violence Project oral history. The Texas death penalty is a chronic disruption of safe holding space for many, not merely the mothers of those who become the objects of its deadly design.
– Walter Long
A Mother Seeks Proof of Life
Late roses are blooming
burgundy ones
Like soldiers on attention
along the concrete walk
through the crewcut fescue
from the surrounding chain link
fence festooned with shiny
silver rows of razor wire
A fifty yard march of shame
to the concrete barracks
where you are interred
with a high mail slot for a window
from which the living dead
cannot see the roses
When Jesus rose from the dead
he asked Thomas to reach his hand
into his fatal wound, to feel
the flesh, to know the tactile heat
which was like that of a baby
fresh from the womb
But I am so innocent at this
I feel so ashamed of my doubt
of life, of my thoughts that
you are already dead even
though you shall appear from
behind a bulletproof pane
And I hear we can match
palms and fingers to glass
for evidence of life
I cannot bear that I think
you are dead even though
you shall appear unlike a
wraith even surely alive
surely warm in your words
As always you will be a cut-up,
the prankster, the one who
helps me laugh off terror
But when I enter the antiseptic
visitor room I see a family
having its last visit through
glass like there will be a
tomorrow though there will
be no tomorrow
And when they fail to bring you out
I worry you are dead
Late roses are blooming
for each cage holding a prisoner
for each visitor at the phone
for each visitor with her hand
on the glass, feeling the glass
imagining flesh, sharing eyes
with dead men, and I. . .
They are not bringing you,
They seem to have lost you
Did I bear you for this?
For them to simply lose you
like countless other young
proud Black men?
It has been thirty minutes, where are you!
I panic. I call the warden. He comes.
I cry. I faint. They bring you out.
I see you! But he escorts me away
past the razor wire and tells me
they cannot tolerate shows like
mine, and he prohibits me from
again returning past the
bloody red flowers.
A Mother Keeps a Messenger
A hawk scream numbs its prey
causes it to go limp moments
before it is taken in the talons
that stop the heart.
The prey of owls hears nothing.
It is taken unaware, as it is in
Japan, hung by the neck with no
notice, unlike Texas,
where the scream is felt years in advance.
The moment they took your brother
you were visited by an owl
that flew into your rig’s grill
and flattened itself there.
You stopped, got out, pried loose
the deceased messenger of death,
pancaked, the rise of what was a
head amid splayed feathers,
and you felt the guilt for not being there ebb.
You took the owl to your mother
who was there when Texas filled
your brother with pentobarbital
to numb him before the strike
And your mother tacked the thing
that was an owl on the wall next
to all the happy photos of her and
your brother before the strike
and you felt that your brother had come home.