Jesse Fowler
Jesse Fowler (he/him/his) is from New Jersey. He is the Drs. Lois Recascino Wise and Charles R. Wise O’Neill Public Management Fellow at the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University Bloomington. Fowler’s influences include Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Frank O’Hara’s “A Step Away from Them,” and Ernest Hemingway’s “[Blank Verse],” as well as Salvador Dalí’s Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus).
While Fowler began to write poetry in Los Angeles, California, it was not until serving in the Peace Corps in Mexico that he truly heard his muse. As such, Fowler considers his time in Mexico to be a personal volta that has given his life added meaning. This meaning has led him to write many poems, especially while in quarantine at the Jersey Shore, that is, after being repatriated in 2020 because of COVID-19. As COVID-19 began to alter reality, the two poems proposed were written while watching the rainfall over the mountains in the Xicotepense region of Mexico. The first poem is called “To the Poets I Go.” The second poem is a Spanish translation of that poem called “A los poetas ya me voy.” Both poems appear in di-vêrsé-city 2020: Their Voices Still Ring, special ed., edited by Stephen Sebert and Charles A. Stone, Austin Poets International, 2020.
To the Poets I Go in Two Languages
To the Poets I Go
You need to learn to walk in His ways,
says the priest with a bottle of God’s blood
in his arthritic hand tired of worshiping alone,
Follow Him all of your days – cue the choir &
someone will moan an amen in the shadows
from which they all try to blindly escape.
But I know who I am – & he’s not them.
They know the fire in the sky, yet forget
or ignore the rain in between there & here.
The rain is every transfigured soul warning
to not give up the future for glory days.
I breathe to walk down the wet road & greet the breathless
who know what we all know deep down inside –
that we exist for our own creation, to join
the poets who’ve walked before us, alone
& perhaps also worshiping, but confidently & in the rain.
A los poetas ya me voy
Ustedes tienen que aprender a caminar como Él,
dice el padre con una botella de la sangre del Señor
en la mano artrítica que está cansada por adorar a solas,
Síganlo a Él todos sus días – es la hora del coro &
dentro de las sombras que todos tratan de evitar a ciegas,
alguien gemirá amén.
Pero sé quien soy – & él no es como ellos.
Conocen el sol del cielo, pero olvidan
o ignoran la lluvia desde allá hasta aquí.
La lluvia son todas las almas transfiguradas quienes ya están advirtiendo
que nadie deba abandonar el futuro por días de gloria.
Yo respiro para caminar por la calle mojada & para presentarme a los muertos
quienes saben la verdad que todos sabemos en el fondo –
que existimos para nuestra propia creación, para ingresar en
el grupo de los poetas que ya han caminado a solas
& tal vez mientras también adoran, pero con confianza en ellos mismos & en la lluvia.