BreakBread Spotlight with Desiree Hensley
In BreakBread’s Summer 2021 print edition, Desiree Hensley invites the reader to consider the changing seasons and their relationship with grief. Her poem “Fruit of my Wounds” is small but mighty, parsing the Appalachian connection with place and time while asking us to accept nature’s machinations.
Hensley spoke with BreakBread about drawing from her roots in Appalachia and using the region’s connection with tradition and generations upon generations living next to one another to convey a message of hopefulness in the face of grief. She said that as she gets older “I find that I am surprised when something I thought I was long since over comes back and upsets me.” We are supposed to grieve for a set period of time and then move on. But, often we are not able to truly process our emotions in a publicly acceptable way, we need time.
As a lifelong reader and lover of books, Hensley has never strayed far from the written word. Until recently, like many young creatives, she did not submit her work for consideration. Currently, she is a university student in Virginia and in a creative writing class of hers an extra credit assignment was to submit something via Submittable. Her professor, the current poet laureate of Virginia Luisa A. Igloria, was “was very encouraging” she said.
Her 15 line poem is a description of nature’s ripening process in its most basic form. We are told of “rinds rendering in vinegar” and “seeds dried on newspaper,” and importantly these are the titular fruits of Hensley’s wounds. She said that in her creative work, she’ll often “com[e] back to issues cyclical in nature: generations, histories, families, and fruit in this case.” The fruit are symbolic of both nature or time’s effects on us all and also the psychological aspects of growth and aging.
In a sense, the fruits and their descriptions of aging, condensing, hardening, and generally undergoing a change catalysed by a process they have no control of is a clear metaphor for the fact that we are indelibly affected by the trauma of a loved one dying.
According to Hensley, she conceived of this poem when she saw her mother drying fruit on the kitchen table. She said “fruit is very anatomical. I thought of wombs, of the saying ‘fruit of my womb’ but when I went to go write it down it came out ‘fruit of my wounds’ and I worked the rest out from there.”
She went on to say that they “do have a similar sound: womb-wound, and so many generational wounds are passed down via the womb.”
In the end “Fruit of my Wounds” leaves you searching within to understand your own emotional continuum. Am I letting myself process things in a healthy way? Are my priorities clouding my judgment?
“I wouldn’t say nature heals, but it helps. Sitting with nature is something that has the potential to do a lot” Hensley said.
Written by Clayton Tomlinson