The poem opens with an assertion encased in metaphorical imagery: “The sky is a dry pitiless white.” One could insert this line into any of a million other poems and it would not be much beyond a literal description. In this case, the opening line has a meaning that is everything but literal. This sets the stage for the entire poem in which an entire narrative is conveyed through figurative language rather than literal. The opening line is not about the sky. It is a metaphor for history or, more specifically, the written account of the past that passes for history.
That history has been written by white society; men for the overwhelming part. The words that open the third line of the poem puts it all into perspective. “History is a ship forever setting sail” is an image that situates the factual events of the past as forever being in a state of flux as it prepares to become the historical record. What this poem is about is how actual historical events and the written record casually referred to as history are not always aligned as parallel lines. A ship forever setting sail is an image that suggests a voyage having significant trouble reaching its destination. If history is a destination, then the process of writing it is something that is constantly up for grabs. This is a poem about historical revisionism.
Historical revisionism is a term that often induces an immediately negative connotation as if revising the historical record is analogous to revising the facts. That is the divergence that this poem attacks: historical accounts and historical facts are not automatically analogous. The bulk of this poem imagines how the black women who have been erased from the historical record over the centuries will eventually be recognized for their contributions. Imagery is used to convey this optimistic expectation. “Our name / Is blown from tree to tree, scattered by the breeze” is a metaphor that contextualizes literal truth.
For instance, take the story which is told in the film “Hidden Figures.” That is a film about African American women who worked behind the scenes at NASA in the early days of the Space Race. Their contributions have always been historical facts and have even occasionally made it into the historical record. The film did not bring this story to the consciousness of a large segment of the public until 2016 even though the story itself begins in 1961. When the speaker of the poem imagines how the voices of those women erased from history rise “from moan to growl” and from “growl to a hound’s low bray” until it finally becomes as loud as “thunder” the story of those NASA mathematicians is exactly the sort of thing she is talking about.
Some people were aware of this story and purposely chose to bury it as much as possible. Even though it did not make it into the textbooks or The Right Stuff, as a historical fact the contributions made by these women were known and could be shared. Shared from one person to another person, one at a time, if necessary, like single leaves being blown from a tree one at a time until the yard below is literally covered by leaves.
The point of the poem, of course, is that there are so many of these stories to be told. And while it is certain that some of them are doomed to “lie quiet as the bedrock” that remains unseen beneath the soil, erosion will eventually uncover others. Metaphorically speaking, it will take erosion of the lies of written history to set the record straight. But since history is always on the verge of leaving the harbor rather than always on the verge of arriving at its destination, there will be plenty of opportunities to revise that record so that the truth is finally told.
