for the Honorable Denise Page Hood, with gratitude for her service to the
children of Detroit on the InsideOut Literary Arts Project Board of Directors
Judge Denise Page Hood
If the trees inspire your poems,
why not read your poems to the trees,
suggested one child. With my poems
I push back, proclaimed another. Mine
write a path to the clouds, said a third.
A poem is a bridge, a stay in words,
an opening in the heart, a point of impact.
Think sound, think attention,
the snap of a monk’s fingers,
the stroke on a bell or chime, or the quick
rap of the gavel.
Each sound has its outer-
most echo of vibration, its one point
stretching
to the last atom’s shiver on the edge
of awareness.
Dickinson knew that edge. My business
is Circumference, she declared, meaning
the line between what we know and cannot
know. Remember
when we took her to the House of Art,
readers from eight to eighty paying tribute
to her, and you, dear Denise, your friends
filling the chairs.
Now tribute is what we give again,
and here our gavel echoes back
through centuries, as gafol “tribute”
in medieval England, from Old English
giefan “to give” or, from Welsh
“to hold.”
Here is what I know
within our sphere, despite our damaged air:
how this decade long each child’s poem
has sung in part and echoed out into the world
because of you. Their words dig
into loss and limitation. They stake
claims and hopes and challenges,
say their poems live in stars
waiting to be wished on, find the magic
inside their pencils.
And is this not a field for justice?
Let the gavel sound an oasis of love
and imagination. When danger beats
at their front doors, may their poems become
a force field around them, as you, dear Judge,
with your kind guidance, have been for us all.
– Terry Blackhawk
Presented at the investiture of Denise Page Hood as Chief Judge of the US District Federal Court on January 28, 2016.
Published in HOUR Detroit, March 2016