Vox Populi
A curated webspace for Poetry, Politics, and Nature. Over 16,000 daily subscribers. Over 7,000 archived posts.
Sarah Browning: This Is the Poem
.
I am on the Parkway with Fred, driving home
from Baltimore to DC. We’ve been to a packed
.
and riotous tribute to Ms. Lucille Clifton
at the public library. How we start talking
.
about history and my slave-owning forbears
and poetry I don’t remember, but that’s how it is
.
with Fred – we talk about these things.
I tell Fred I’ve been trying and failing
.
to find my way into the head
of my great grandmother or anyone else
.
who owned other people, trying to imagine.
Fred says, Well, maybe that’s not the poem.
.
Maybe this is the poem – you and I,
a Black man and a white woman,
.
crossing state lines below the Mason-Dixon Line.
The traffic stalls for late-night repairs
.
and we stop, between these two cities.
We are friends in a car.
.
And how could the Black men mutilated
and beaten and thrown in rivers
.
for just this – talking with a white woman,
crossing state lines, riding in a car –
.
not come and congregate with Fred and me
as we sit quietly a moment?
.
Construction lights flash in our eyes.
I wonder about the white women –
.
where are they in this story?
How could they bear
.
what had been done in their names?
Was there ever one who said no?
___
copyright 2015 Sarah Browning
Vox Populi 
Hope she will read this poem when she features for the Cape Cod Poetry Group on May 5, 2014, 7-8:30 pm at the Wellfleet Library!
https://www.facebook.com/events/689790954479856/
LikeLike
Sarah– brilliant and beautiful. Thank you….j
LikeLike
Reblogged this on PostModernity's Red-headed Stepchild and commented:
Cadre, my friend, Sarah Browning’s poetry will run in series at Vox Populi for some weeks. Drop by, read. She’s all the good.
LikeLike