Before daddy left, he gave mama
a brand-new feed sack dress, and planted
one last crop; I was her, ‘God’s Perfect
Number,’ the seventh heavenly stair step
to kick at her backbone, breeched, then
brought by a poor white trash midwife.
That year, our windmill huffed the horse
trough full of mule dust, and the persimmon
cheeks hollowed in early September. A field
of bluebells captured an awol rebel sun shower,
then flanked a hackberry column on the north
fence line, and drank the rest of the water.
The old southern gentry had long since vanished
but only rich white folks could book space
on the Glory Train. Martin wasn’t born yet,
so the saints weren’t marching in.
Daddy left us south of the Mason-Dixon Line
in a cottonwood sharecropper shanty, squat
over the scratch dirt where an overseer’s
pointer pup itched his worms. He’d hung
a Rainbow Bread sign on our screen door
to set it apart from the trees. I grew up along
the Yazoo, where roly polys pushed each
other across farmed out river bottom flatland,
and ebony ivories still harped on ‘Delta Blues.’
What a pretty poem, rich in detail, the type of descriptions that place you squarely in that time and that place where you can feel it, smell it, and see it. Beautifully written.