Franklin’s poems reflect the communal shock experienced by readers of Shakespeare (Titus Andronicus) or Ovid (Metamorphoses), or the shock of those viewing a photo of two women who died in the Holocaust, or those viewing the more recent viral photo of the drowned child of Syrian refugees:
The waves touch
your forehead as if
to wake you.
Your mother placed
your little shoes
on your feet with such
care for the long journey
that they didn’t open
while you drowned.
Your small body washes
up, one more sign
of our sin, on the sand.
Again love and punishment are hand in hand. This poem captures the devastation of our punishment (“one more sign/of our sin”), but also the beauty of the world in the waves and the mother’s love.
The truth, Franklin shows us in these poems, is that for all the moments of brilliant joy and gratitude we experience, we carry the world’s weight with us, our stories of pain. In “How to Ride the Subway without Getting Hurt,” a title which, like the earlier negatives, one takes as ironic, she ends: “Pretend you can forget about the rats scavenging beneath you./Pretend you can forget.”