Infant, Name Once Known
“Infant, Name Once Known” is part of the collection Poems of Witness and Possibility: Inside Zones of Conflict. Read the introduction to the collection here.
Before putting a newly printed label
on a brown lidded box, I hummed
a lullaby, tears streaming,
while removing the remains
of someone’s child
from the wires, wingnut, and metal rod
that had held them on display
for more than half a century, and
placed them in their new cardboard cradle.
I will not presume the right
to give you a name
but I can, at least, recognize
that you once had one.
Jenny L. Davis is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and an associate professor of anthropology and American Indian studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she directs the American Indian Studies Program and co-directs the Center for Indigenous Science. A linguistic anthropologist and poet, her research includes Indigenous language futurism (including language reclamation and revitalization); Queer Indigenous studies; speculative fiction and poetry; the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and repatriation; and Indigenous/community-based methods. Davis is the author of the poetry collection Trickster Academy and of the book Talking Indian: Identity and Language Revitalization in the Chickasaw Renaissance. She serves as the chair of her campus NAGPRA Advisory Committee and as a member of the Commission for the Ethical Treatment of Human Remains (TCETHR) of the American Anthropological Association.
