Labor Day Eulogy

As another hurricane bears down on New Orleans, this poem that appeared in THE RALEIGH NEWS AND OBSERVER shortly after Katrina's devastation seems appropriate.

❉❉❉❉❉❉❉❉❉❉
In the days after Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, I was in near constant email communication with my friend doris davenport, African-American poet and performance artist, who now lives in Albany, Georgia. Her grief over the destruction of New Orleans and my own horror at what I saw unfolding came together in message after urgent message. I wanted to speak to our words shared across the the racial divide that this disaster has so clearly revealed and to draw the horrific images that we beheld together into the closing image of “Hands All Around,” my favorite quilt pattern from the North Carolina Mountains, one that signifies what we must do in the wake of this disaster.

LABOR DAY EULOGY
          

........ This labor to make our words matter
is  what any good quilter teaches.
A stitch in time,  let’s  say.
A  blind stitch,
that grips the edges
of what’s left,  the ripped
scraps and  remnants, whatever
won’t stop taking shape even though the whole
crazy quilt’s falling to pieces.
                   from "Mountain Time" Black Shawl, LSU Press, 1998


for doris davenport


This day we’ve been given
to sit down and catch our breath,
look at the goldenrod flooding
the roadsides, the pumpkin vines

clinging to rusty fence,
coneflowers blooming their last,
I keep thinking of words
from a poem I wrote so many years ago
I can’t remember the woman who wrote it,

the one who believed words do
matter.   And yet our words burned
across cyberspace last week,
our deep-Southern horror and rage
at what we beheld, our people

flailing in  high water,
wandering rubble like ghosts,
while the microphones stalked them,
wanting some raw words to beam

round the country,
the man who wailed over his wife
washed away,"She Gone!"
Old women rocking on porches
the waters spared, muttering

prophecies nobody knew
how to understand.
"Listen," I wanted to say
to the journalists,  President,
all the ones come down to pose
for their photo-ops, "Listen!"

And let the words linger
a long time, for these are the voices
of this place we love,  These are
our people, we said again and again, 

for we know how the old ditch
of race makes us stumble
apart from each other. But not now.
We poets now must labor,
to listen and  make our words
matter enough to stitch
"Hands All Around"  to pull over us
all, saying, Rest awhile here
in the silence from which our best words
grow like coneflowers,
pumpkin vines clinging to fencewire for dear life.



"Hands All Around" is a favorite quilt pattern here in the  NC mountains.

Drought

Drought

The smell of dirt, always
the smell of dry dirt down in Georgia
where I sweated through summer,
my father complaining about the blue sky
stretching all the way west into Arkansas.
Dry ice they’d tumble
from planes sometimes. Thunder
and strong wind might come

but no rain. The pigs grumbled
from sunup to sundown. The cows stood
immobilized under the oak trees,
their turds turning black as the biscuits I burned
while I daydreamed. Where I played I saw corn dying
year after year, teased by dust devils
leaving their dust in between my toes
and in ring after ring round my neck. I scrubbed
ring after ring of black dirt from the bathtub
at night. I got used to my own sweat

and so much hot weather
the silly petunias collapsed
by mid-afternoon. Without looking I knew what
I’d find, the whole flower bed lazy

as I was. You hold up
your shoulders straight, I heard a thousand times.
Books on my head, I’d be sent out
to water the flowers as if that would help salvage
anything but my good humor, the smell of wet dirt

my reward, for which I knew I ought
to be grateful. I am
grateful, now that I’m thirsty as dry land

I stand upon, stoop-shouldered,
wanting a flash flood to wash away Georgia
while I aim the water hose into a sad patch of pansies
as if nothing’s changed. I can still hear my father complain
while my mother cooks supper and I swear to leave
home tomorrow. In Oregon dams burst
but I don’t believe it. Here water is
only illusion, an old trick
light plays on the high way that runs north
through field after field after field.


from The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest, Texas Tech University Press, 1986, AWP Award Series