un-Till

I am a house that watched its own foundation crack,

a soil that stole a sweetness it could never return.

I remember the Tallahatchie not as a river,

but as a throat that swallowed a song I wasn't ready to hear,

then coughed it back up, bruised and heavy with my own irony.

*

The loss did not arrive like a thunderclap;

it seeped into the floorboards of my grocery stores,

it settled like a fine, gray soot on the pews of my churches.

I see him in the way the children play and whistle,

in the sudden, cold silence of a summer afternoon

where a boy’s laughter should have been a permanent fixture.

*

I carry the weight of the ring of sacrifice he wore,

the silver pressing into my own palm of patriotism.

I am the mother who stood over the glass,

and I am the hands that made that glass necessary.

How do I scrub the salt from my fields which I reap?

when I am the one who sowed the tears?

He is gone, but he is everywhere in the draft afternoon wind.

*

He is the name I stutter when I try to speak of justice,

a ghost that refuses to be a memory,

haunting the very land that tried to hide him.

I am a nation standing in its own rain,

listening to the echo of a bridge that leads to nowhere,

waiting for a forgiveness I have not yet earned the right to ask for.