errol miller
The Longing
“There is a longing dearer than breathing.”
Margaret Walker
We come up from Southland for the prize:
you can see campfires full of healing
if you believe, you can disappear
into the Delta for forty days and nights
and after the floodwaters recede
the evidence is still there:
out of the bleakness of a no-man’s
velvet land that old familiar longing
of man’s eternal sprit, centered in Oxford
and in flesh and blood and bone
in the night-carriages of the very rich
who have written more and recorded
bigger names in the Book of Life
out of the childhood womb
we flow far past Des Moines
on sleepless nights, the branch of cypress
murmuring and the click of wheel on rail
this is the pulsating Pullman picture
down in New Orleans they are playing hard
but they’ll die the same, in the canebrakes
of rural Louisiana I have seen
the wing of vulture fall
I have heard the singing directed
towards us all, those martial songs
of primitive past, the evidence
is conclusive , perhaps rain tomorrow
and a canopy overhead, the ghastly ghost
of Molly Brown and muddy boots and leggings
fireflies in tin cups and remembrances
of a loving people, come with me
and document peace in our time
a beast is among us
and forever shall stalk the river-barges
I am flowing out to you in a ballad
of sad cafes, the wind, gusting
in a rose-scented chariot
form another time, another place
full of healing and mended together
by a string of glowing lanterns
illuminating man’s perpetual
rowing to the Beulah Land
across the levee.
