They never knew
living
beneath the poverty line meant
living
below the water table.
Down here red
mud seeps
into lungs to be
digested; clay
feeding cells, strengthening
wombs, growing
sperm already named
and allocated.
And they drift…
…along the Swanee River
remembering deities sometimes
bled and were bled,
like them, were
sometimes named
James, Audre, Fannie,
Christophe
like them,
baked bread and
had babies out
of nothing but love-
molded bricks of
delta mud,
like they did.
This
aint nothing new
they sing-
a song of the south- deep
and equatorial-
transplanted and transported
north and beyond, poverty
strung in every chord.
But memory
slips.
hard times get
soft and deceptively
smooth, leaving
the folk learning
to tread water
all over again.
1 comments:
you know I'm a big fan, right?! beautiful work. So when's the book coming out? I'll be in town and maybe doing something with DDC at the end of April. Maybe we can make it a BGLAM night or "homecoming". I especially like the "poem in progress" you shared with BGLAMMers. Sometimes people steal, not so much the words, but the sentiments out of your thought-pockets. I read (especially) the poem in progress and was refreshed....in knowing... we are never, never, never alone on this: feeling, desire, and the shape it takes as poetry. stay up. - T
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