RIVER VOICES

The Flint River surges along its journey a mere three miles from the farm where I grew up.   The town of Newton, Georgia lies along its banks and the old Newton Bridge used to be the object of great trepidation when we would drive over it.  One-lane and ramshackle (or so it sounded) it always caused us womenfolk to worry that a truck would come our way and force us into the muddy depths.  "Don't look down," my mother would warn.  What might we see if we did?

This poem, in the ancient Persian form of the ghazal, explores that obsession with the river.  The first in  a series I hope to write about the Flint, it introduces some of the obsessive imagery I've carried with me over the years.  This poem appears in the current Pembroke Magazine.

River Voices

           " ...  say the  past is a muddy

river"

                                       

                                                     -- Evie Shockley

When  she lowers her hands to the river

she feels many dead voices translating river.

Her fingers turn cold, but her lips part,

as if, like a hooked  fish, she longs for the river.

Don’t look down, her mother warned; shifting

the Ford into second gear, crossing the river.

The drawbridge’s rusty spine still rattles

memories she tries to dredge from the river.  

Old men cast their histories into the depths

she can’t reach.  Stories keep shape-shifting over the river.

The trees keep their roots to themselves;

but they let their reflections be stroked by the river. 

When she hears the cricket frogs singing,

she wants to lie down on the banks of the river.

Come night she hears voices.  A drunken brawl.  Somebody

cursing the day he was born.  Somebody trying to drown in the river.

The backwater nags at her.  Dare she strip 

down to the bone and walk barefooted into the river?

PEMBROKE MAGAZINE: SOUTHERN WRITERS

The new issue of Pembroke Magazine is fresh off the press, focused on the American South and edited by Jennifer Key, herself a rising young poet with many accolades to her credit, including a prize from Shenandoah, one of the country's most celebrated literary journals.  I hope to feature her work eventually on this blog.

Jennifer asked me to send her some poems for this issue, which I was happy to do.  The following piece had its beginning twelve years ago while I was at the Hambidge Center in north Georgia.  I had brought stacks of journals I'd kept, filled with drafts of poems in handwriting I often could no longer read terribly well.  I pulled a few lines out from my scribbles, typed them into a disk on my ancient Mac, and proceeded to forget them.  This spring I pulled them out again and completed this poem.

I grew up reading my father's weighty books on the Civil War, haunted by the photographs of soldiers and battlefields, memorizing descriptions of the battlefields.....Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg.  At the center of my fixation, though, was Sherman's march through Georgia, branded forever into my memory by Gone With the Wind.  I wrote at least three poems about that experience, one entitled " Seeing GWTW for the Sixth Time," an obsession halted, I hope, by the the last GWTW poem I will ever write (I hope) titled "Gone Again."  This poem comes at the subject of William Tecumseh Sherman from another angle.     War is still hell, and we have only to look at our latest battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan to see the wasteland it creates, the scorched earth approach that Sherman practiced so well.

 From a Safe Distance

“War is hell,” Sherman said,

torching his way from Atlanta 

to the port of Savannah,

with God knows how many

small towns left burning between.

But tonight who’d believe him?

This new war’s a video game.

Push a button.  

Just look, we are winning,

the missiles on target,

 the clean zap of

bombs hitting bulls-eye! 

A child’s game

for overgrown children. 

A genius,  that S.O.B. Sherman,

he knew, once a war has been turned loose, 

it goes where it bloody well pleases.

Growing up, I found war

in the pages of Civil War volumes  

my father collected.  Photos of Stonewall

and Lee, the lost faces of 15 year olds

and the corpses at Shiloh seemed more real 

than counterparts snapped during D-Day

or, later, the peasants  

littering a road outside My Lai.  

Back then war was a book 

I could open or close when I wanted

and draw from a safe distance

its inevitable conclusions. 

No photos tonight of the slain

on my television screen,

no houses scattered like book pages

ripped from their spines,

but soon we’ll see leakage of bodies

blown into a digitized rubble by pilots

who speak with an accent I understand,

down-home and commonsense.

Do what you have to do.  

Lock on those suckers

and bring them down.  Sherman

would be pleased, the streets burning,

nothing much left of another small town. 

My Lai----Photo by Ronald L. Haeberle