Post the Second 2 or A poem for New Orleans

The city

Is touched by

Madness

The cracks in

The sidewalk

Filled with memories

and ghosts

Walk through the

night

Looking  for home

–

This used to be

Swampland

She said

Teeming with muddy

Water

and the sediment

of centuries

A sacred place

Where the rains

Of the four corners

would mix

Bringing tidings

Of great things

In land

Far away

–

How do you mourn

That which

is no longer felt

no longer known

How do you remember

Something

that was never forgotten?

–

Now the land is

rotten

she said

Buried under layers

of oil and concrete

levees and canals

What once was a home

to many

Is now a barren place

Filled with the miasma

of self-hatred and

Willful neglect

–

How do you imagine

Something that is real

Manifest something

That can never be

Make love to something

That was never there?

–

The marrow of this place

She said

has been sucked dry

desicated remains litter

the ground

white shapes savagely

drain

Art Culture Experience

for their sustenance

trying to stave off

the Yawing jaws of emptiness

I must have more

They say

More More More

and their appetites are never

sated

–

Despite this

She said

We survive

In the cracks of

The sidewalk

Growing up out

of destruction

In the notes that leap

from the Jazz bands

Brass

In the homes

we rebuild and the seasons

we weather

–

We survive

She said

Because we must

There is no other option

the ancestors that we

Remember impel us

Forward

To claim what is ours

–

I see now

Where the road

Turns

and resistance exists

even if it is not

known

Post the Seventy-Second or The Sun still Rises

She tells me

“I am an old thing

Full of creaks, cracks and wood worn smooth

Full of recuerdos y canciones

Full of life but filled with the memories of the dead”

I ask her

What do you remember?

She tells me

“I remember

falling from my mother’s arm

and slowly poking my way up

through the brown soil

I remember

Growing tall

And reaching deep

I remember

Feeling the glory of the dawn each morning

And the restfulness of the dusk each evening

But I also remember

White men coming to my island

Needlessly felling my sisters

And uprooting the land for their consumption

I remember

The people that I used to shelter under my majestic boughs

Needlessly cut down by sword and disease

Families uprooted and enslaved for their profit

I remember

Weeping

When they brought people of black skin

From over the sea

To work in fields that ruined the land I so loved

Ruined the spirits of those who were so far from their own trees

I remember

A country fighting for independence

Only to be recolonized”

I remember-

Stop! I say

It is too much

I ask

How do you hold so much pain and not go insane?

She replies

“Insanity is the only appropriate response to genocide

But the Sun still Rises.”