Review: If Only the Dust Would Settle
Momoh Sekou Dudu
Poet Althea Romeo-Mark is surefooted when she “contemplates the meaning of home.” In her impassioned poetry book, If Only the Dust Would Settle, she details the many facets of her conceptualized notion of ‘home.’ She wastes no time, in fact, in familiarizing the reader with her internationalist view on the subject. “Home for me is a flower,” she writes in the book’s introduction, “the petals of which have been scattered down many paths.” From there on out, Professor Romeo-Mark embarks on a singular mission: using the unique cultural awareness she’s amassed from her time living and working in myriad places across the globe to tackle vexing questions of cross-cultural practices, socio-economic classism, the finite nature of life, and so on.
She starts us out on the all-encompassing journey reflecting on the practice of grieving for the dead in some cultures. In Grave Yard Sagas, she writes, solemnly, of how men in some traditions are groomed to bury grief under a veneer of machoism.
The funeral is over. Men gathered at a nearby bar, drink straight rounds of rum in honor of the dead, quench their burning thirst, and shovel pain under raucous laughter
As she does throughout the book, she does not judge; she simply relates.
In At the Well, she addresses, with intense passion, the toils of life in some economically disadvantaged/mismanaged parts of the world. For something as basic as securing drinkable water, people, in these places, struggle hard.
No one has ever heard buckets gliding into the abyss; no one has ever heard the splash. Basins balanced on heads, water drips and trickles and spills onto shoulders. If the spirits allowed they would trudge to the top of the craggy hill …basins still three quarters full.
With a fervent ode to her late father, Professor Romeo-Mark speaks to human fragility, and to, ultimately, the finite nature of life. She writes in Becoming Gilberto:
The nonagenarian once feared for his sternness walks unsteadily, each step directed by faith, each fragile limb aware that time has been generous.This family patriarch knows his time is rationed, has renounced his wild days, has given way to reason and asks that his children get closer to God.
In the end, in Can I Borrow Your Smile?, Professor Romeo-Mark asks us all to remain unbowed, to transcend life’s challenges, to ensure we each can muster the courage to “stoke up my flagging spirit, battered and cold from long journeys filled with blistering winters.” It does not matter what your ‘blistering winter’ is: economic hardship, institutionalized violence, racial discrimination, separated families, etc., remain unbowed, borrow a smile, and “stoke up [your] flagging spirit.”
If only the Dust Would Settle will speak to you no matter the hue of your skin or your station in life.
Paperback: 108 pages; Publisher: AuthorHouse (May 22, 2009). Language: English; ISBN-10: 1438982674; ISBN-13: 978-1438982670.
Momoh Sekou Dudu is a writer and educator. He is the author of the memoir Harrowing December: A Journey of Sorrows & Triumphs (2014) and the novel Forgotten Legacy (2018). He resides, along with his family, in the Minneapolis, Minnesota suburb of Otsego.
https://mdsekoublog.wordpress.com/2018/07/07/review-if-only-the-dust-would-settle/
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