Gretchen Bartels-Ray

Gretchen Bartels-Ray lives and writes in San Diego, California and is an associate professor of English at California Baptist University. Her research interests include Victorian literature, children's literature, and the Oxford Inklings. She also writes poetry and fiction. She has published in Literature and Theology, The Ekphrastic Review, KAIROS Literary Magazine, Sojourners, and Every Day Fiction. In 2021, her poems “Anthropause” (Sojourners) and “Apricot Rose” (KAIROS Literary Magazine) draw inspiration from the global pandemic and the protests following the murder of George Floyd. The two unpublished poems submitted for the PAMLA Arts Matter: Among the Unrest roundtable, “Naked Athena” and “You Can’t Shout the Walls Down,” also engage with and represent these unprecedented times.  

NAKED ATHENA

Rage in me, muse, and tell the tale

of a woman sprung from news cycle 

fully formed, and near naked as birth.

In mask and stocking cap,

she calls to wisdom, to war,

to strength, to vulnerability.

Officers planted for battle,

like nettles or hemlock,

are armed with what is called less lethal, 

their own traumas, and their pasts.

Hero or Distraction,

Goddess or Woman?

Pale skin naked against the blacktop—

 “Shoot this, look at this!”—

blood from the police shot running down the  

legs spread wide to birth the world. 

Who snapped the photo that showed you

alone against the phalanx?

The photo that saw you but

missed the multitude behind you?

In your fifteen minutes of

silence, screaming against the violence,

you leave us to wrestle for wisdom,

to trace your meaning and ours,

to ask how to listen, to amplify, 

to see our bodies and recognize privilege,

and to look past you to the movement. 

YOU CAN’T SHOUT THE WALLS DOWN

You can’t shout the wall down

if this isn’t Jericho.

I don’t know what is stronger

than love.
Walls must be surrounded and 

doors must be loved open

Slowly

Painfully.

As you learn that, Jericho or not,  

you can never silence the wall down. 
If there’s silence, it is only to hear

the shofar sound and join

in with a triumphant shout

because you can’t shout the wall down

until its time.

If this isn’t Jericho I don’t know what is.