Dylan Staudte, a Prison Education Project student currently incarcerated at the Women’s Eastern Reception, Diagnostic, and Correctional Center in Vandalia, Missouri, shared a piece of their poetry initially written for Dr. Meredith Kelling’s Critical and Researched Writing course in a collection of poems titled Origin Song and Other Poems of Becoming.
“Origin Song”
There’s something about stories
that have always drawn me.
Stories of gods and goddesses
and their messed up lives
would comfort me, would resonate
and elevate the chaos, somehow
making things sensible, beautiful, tangible.
So let me tell you a tale, an Irish one
I’ve woven into my own:
Moon goddesses, all goddesses, really,
tend to be both warriors and mothers
and my mother was no exception.
She bore a set of twins.
One was a glorious child of the sun
that she refused to name,
and the other was the lucky one
who slipped off quietly into the sea.
The moon was not a good mother, jealous
of the piercing light of the one
and not really cognizant of the other.
Consider this – names are power
and you aren’t alive,
aren’t even a person
without one.
So how did the lucky one
get a name,
and what made him so lucky?
Was it escaping to drift alone in the sea,
soothed by the rhythm of the waves
wafting his name, his identity:
Dylan, Dylan, Dylan?
I am the twin refused, wandering nameless
beneath a cold moon
searching for my brother,
for the other half of me.
The tide tugs away my footprints, lifting
them up and out of the sand. I stare
into the waters
and find him staring back at me.
A wave engulfs us in a gulp of sound,
entangling son and daughter, daughter and son,
enmeshing sky and water, sun and ground.
Let the moon glow cold and breathless.
Let her envy consume her
right down to her bitter core.
She cannot control us
for we are the lucky ones,
stronger for our sorrows, our triumphs
breathing as one breath with the waves
Dylan, Dylan, Dylan.