Holly Springs: a second letter
for my father
Rochelle Holt
Sometimes I feel the island of myself
a silver mercury that slips and runs,
revolving frantic mirrors in itself
beneath the pressure of a million thumbs.
- Tennessee Williams “The Siege”
i
After the first winter of our content
excluding the ice storm
that paralyzed the city
whose heart is over a hundred years old
the season of flowering Judas
and dogwood has arrived;
the south reporter stated that
an old man driving a cart
led by two thin tired mules
collided with progress.
A shortage of fuel, no respite of cool,
one mule was killed by the car.
North of Oxford
where we confronted seven Faulkner scholars
and learned who Missippi calls her own --
Thomas Lanier Williams with
his 27 Wagons Full of Cotton; Richard Wright’s
Black Boy; Eudora Welty’s The Ponder Heart --
the lawyers
around the courthouse square
not really caring about
Black Folk’s property and land
and rights
until a strange badly printed Alliance sheet
by the people
we’re learning fast
about poetry of the blues.
South of W. C. Handy
and Bessie Smith
I woke up this mornin’
dreamin’ of chains and things
B. B. King in Itta Bena,
Muddy Waters in Rolling Fork,
“Everybody wants to know why I sing the blues.”
The sun is still too hot
and the rain eternal
internal, infernal
until I spy giant petals
of a lemon-white magnolia tree
and wonder where beauty has been blossoming
all my life
down South voices singing and really meaning
“Give Us That Old Time Religion!”
Discovering Jean Toomer
“A gong-lit race of slaves.”
How the heat enflames me
untames me
makes me want to snip roses, berries
shiny holly leaves. We see pinwheels in the sky.
ii
Black girl black girl
when you walk you are
magic as a rising bird
or a falling star.
- Dudley Randall “Blackberry Street”
We have heard the Black man
and are in “Sympathy” with
Paul Laurence Dunbar,
Malcolm X, W. E. B. DuBois,
Langston Hughes, the views of
Frederick Douglas, James Baldwin,
LeRoi Jones, not in that order
but their voices like geese
in a strange fog, a
heavy, flashy humis mist
when an unrhymed song permeates
the minds of your Nefertiti women
like cordials from honeyed lips
of their brothers?
Queens make waves and rise.
They do not sit in silence and wait
behind any man or woman pushing, praying
dreaming
Margaret Danner is not Margaret Walker
Sister Sonia songs:
“walk/move in
blk/queenly/ways.”
come down to Spring Hollow
where around us
surround us
crepe myrtle, mimosa, and Spanish moss,
and this time, my letter is for you,
father who would not know what to do
with al the stray dogs that drawl and bark
in hunger, in rebellion, in boredom
and the noblest words shed by Faulkner:
“Help him endure and prevail.”
A woman can be a help in a crisis too
with a soul struggling
to live, to love, to learn.
Swing low, sweet chariot.
In April, in June
when the rain never leaves
the sun, the moon, the Southern
trees, birds, flowers,
showers of cotton balls blowing
in the breeze
while Highway 78 keeps trucking
through the middle of my brain,
we can cope
because Black is Be ...
and soul has no color
except the rainbow, the dawn, the
twilight of the Gods.
I eat canteloupe and jungleplums
and seal memories with watermelon seeds
mailed in an envelope of peace
and seasonal contentment
while the golden sky shines
on me and
Mississippi.
