Dunlop, R. (April 2003). Copper Moon Educational Insights, 8(1). [Available: http://www.ccfi.educ.ubc.ca/publication/insights/v08n01/poeticpause/dunlop/coppermoon.html] Copper Moon



Rishma Dunlop

York University

"Copper Moon" (detail) Suzanne Northcott For Matthew Shepard (1976-1998)

and for his mother and father, Judy and Dennis Shepard



i

Child

of our time, our times have robbed your cradle.

Sleep in a world your final sleep has woken.

Eavan Boland, “Child of Our Time”





In the wake of a thousand years,

your body a scarecrow

battered silhouette against the starlight

of a grave sky

death arrives in a pickup truck

steals your shoes and $20 for coke and cigarettes

wraps your wallet in a dirty diaper

in a garbage pail

for this and for love

you are lashed to your crucifix

your blood a bitter stain

on the place that cradled you



your face

a scarlet mask

but for the clean white tracks

of your tears



and the air around us is a knife

and the taste of death is like rust

in our mouths

and a hundred years closes

a savage end to your journey.



What hope for a new century

unless your brief shining will be

an ecclesiastes

unless in this broken place

some aurora of promise is born

unless your tears cleanse

the skin of the earth

unless our children,

born of this time and the next

learn from your severed wings

and fly

follow you out of this geography

this darkest heart.





I imagine you there

in the primal glow

of a copper moon

the earth curving its shadow

across the lunar surface.



There will be a season for you

when the trees and air and sky are singing

and light will begin in the roses opening,

in the apples falling from trees



and there will be a time for you

when the crows will disappear

mourning doves will vanish,

when faith will rise up

with the songbirds of dawn.



May your breath be resurrected

by the human cantos of mercy.

May you dance beyond these years,

your heart breaking loose

in cathedrals of winds.



May this new century

hold you,

tender as a fontanel.



"Copper Moon" (detail) Suzanne Northcott

ii



You, Mr. McKinney, with your friend Mr. Henderson, killed my son….

You left him out there by himself, but he wasn’t alone… he had the beautiful night sky with the same stars and moon that we used to look at through a telescope. Then he had the daylight and the sun to shine on him one more time—one more cool, wonderful day in Wyoming. His last day in Wyoming. And through it all he was breathing in for the last time the smell of sagebrush and the scent of pine trees from the snowy range. He heard the wind—the ever-present Wyoming wind—for the last time.



Dennis Shepard’s statements to the court, November 4, 1999







In the wake of a thousand years

I drift back on the bent neck of time

to the infant clasp of my firstborn

nursing her on an autumn night

her eyes reflecting

the milky net of stars.



The earth curves its shadow

across the lunar surface

a copper moon glows over the foothills



and in this primal light

I give her to the tidal pulls of sleep and dreams,

my hand cupped beneath her heart.



I remember her flight

through my cave of bones

her life spreading open

the beginning of music and light

an aperture of hope



in the folds of clean white linen

my child so new

all around her lightens and rises

claims me

the distillation of her breath

a universe,

an infinite refrain that enters me.



"Copper Moon" (detail) Suzanne Northcott

iii



Baby boy



If anything stood out, it was the fragileness of Shepard

– Fireside Lounge employees cited by Prosecutor Cal Rerucha





Outside your funeral at the Redemption Chapel

Reverend Phelps marches

with his cronies from Kansas

their signs God Hates Fags

a full-color image of you says

Matt in Hell



and it is a time to mourn

and a time to weep

a time to remember your father

teaching you songs of childhood

Frère Jacques,

Row, Row, Row Your Boat

Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star

how I wonder what you are

up above the world so high

like a diamond in the sky.



The hatemongers at the temple

are surrounded

a parade of people dressed as “Angels of Peace”

white angels for you

seven feet high with eight foot wingspans

and the crowd cheers them on.



I remember

that October night

at the Fireside Lounge,

how death courted you

beer bottle and pool cue in hand

discussing your politics

wrapping the syllables

of a serpent’s coil

around your open heart

your smile shining

like your patent leather shoes.



"Copper Moon" (detail) Suzanne Northcott

iv



this was someone’s child

Melissa Ethridge, “Scarecrow”





and I remember

another mother’s voice

in a Laramie, Wyoming courtroom

claiming mercy for the murderers of her firstborn

Matthew stood for something

mercy for those who could not show mercy

and a father speaks to his son’s killers:

I give you life in the memory

of one who no longer lives.

May you have a long life,

and may you thank Matthew

every day for it.

and I want the sanctity of scriptures

to conjure spells upon my tongue

to pray that this season too shall pass

as if the words might chant

a new scene into being



perhaps those farm fields

filled with wildflowers

the choirs of weeping

hushed in the opiate of poppies



but I see your pistol-whipped body

blood seeping into a nation

I remember the officer who cut you free

speaking of the braces on your teeth,

your school ID in the dust

she whispers to you in the ambulance

words of comfort, Baby boy

and the sound of mothers and fathers

through endless years

is a wailing of sirens in my ear



and I wonder, as I touch

the memory of my sleeping child

her tender fontanel,

as I watch her now

running fleet-footed

through corridors of time,

my anthem, my bloodline calling,

I wonder, if I could cast away stones,

if I could be so merciful

to those who would crush her.



I wonder, if this new century

will hold her,

will her mother’s faith in

memory’s insistence,

be enough

for a millennium of mercy.

"Copper Moon" by Suzanne Northcott, acrylic and phototransfer on wood, 12" x 48"

About “Copper Moon” The poem “Copper Moon” by Rishma Dunlop was written in response to the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard in 1998. The poem is informed by media readings of the event, excerpts from testimonies at the trial of his murderers, as well as personal and public response to the crime. Suzanne Northcott’s painting “Copper Moon” is a response to and artistic dialogue with Dunlop’s poem of the same title. The painting was exhibited as part of The Body of My Garden, a collaborative exhibition and poetry reading with Rishma Dunlop that opened at the Linda Lando Fine Art Gallery, Vancouver, Oct. 24-Nov.2, 2002. Additional paintings from the exhibition responded to Dunlop’s collection of poems The Body of My Garden, Mansfield Press, Toronto, 2002, www.mansfieldpress.net. Northcott and Dunlop continue to work across the genres of literary text and visual art in aesthetic inquiry and collaborative artistic production. The art from The Body of My Garden exhibition can be viewed at www.lindalandofinart.com and www.suzannenorthcott.com. “Copper Moon” by Rishma Dunlop reprinted from The Body of My Garden, Toronto: Mansfield Press, with permission of the author © 2002 Rishma Dunlop and Mansfield Press www.mansfieldpress.net. About the Author Rishma Dunlop is a professor of Literary Studies in the Faculty of Education at York University, Toronto. She is the founder of a research collective of women artists/researchers called The Red Shoes Collective. Current research projects include work on Testimony, History and Memory an exploration of the engagement with literature and the arts for social justice education. Her ongoing collaborations with visual artists include exhibitions of literary texts and art, collaborative publications and performances. Rishma Dunlop is a poet and fiction writer whose work has won awards and has appeared in numerous books and journals. She is the author of two volumes of poetry, Boundary Bay, (1999, Staccato/Turnstone Press) and The Body of My Garden (2002, Mansfield Press). She has recently completed a new manuscript titled The Jeweled and Fevered Heart. Email: rdunlop@edu.yorku.ca About the Artist Suzanne Northcott lives in the historic village of Fort Langley, B.C. Mainly self-taught, her work ranges from contemporary figurative to abstraction. Her work revolves around an exploration of the nature of boundaries and what lies between: between self and other, the material and the subconcious world, or the space between disparate places. She works mainly in acrylic on wood or canvas, sometimes in combination with drawing media and phototransfer. A senior member of the Federation of Canadian Artists, Northcott is in demand around British Columbia and across Canada, teaching creative process and life drawing. She has guest lectured at Capilano College, University College of the Fraser Valley and York University. Her work is widely collected and her awards include the prestigious Aim for Arts International Show and this year's Spillsbury bronze medal. Her collaboration with Dunlop is a continuation of her fascination with words and image and follows an earlier project "The Sex Lives of Vegetables," with poet Lorna Crozier. Email: suzannenorthcott@shaw.ca

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