~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Turpentine Blues -Cross City, Florida, 1939

Riding the woods with the foreman

out to the gum patches, pines towering

over the chippers, pullers, dippers,

the choppers at work on tree faces,

pulling the best rosins out of virgin stands.

A penny a tree, up to 700 chipped a week –

three years before it’s spent, never mind

the men, sun-up to sun-down in that heat.

After supper they gamble for cigarettes.

Zora smokes with them at the shacks

on evening porches. Hardened fellas,

they’re tired but flirtatious, passing a jar

of hooch, a small relief, as the season

won’t end until November. Waiting

on her WPA crew and their recording

equipment, she goads the boys for material.

Sing me a song, she says, tell me your life.

Oh, Lord! We can’t leave, with dogs on our heels. There’s

graves out in them fields. They kill us if we run.

Good Lord! We got to stay. There’s killers in white hoods,

and a sheriff with a gun. They kill us if we run.

Before dawn, the foreman’s noisy rousing. Out

another day, and not long before sweat’s soaking

through duck cloth, foreheads beaded. She wonders how

ow they don’t faint. They chip and pull and dip and chop

to pay back the commissary, in debt peonage; slavery

by a modern name. Men’s bodies a sacrifice at the altar

of the still. Oh, tell me your life, she says, sing me

your Blues. I won’t forget – I’ll tell the world for you.

Garden of Heavenly Rest

-Fort Pierce, Florida, 2017

Ground flat as a skillet, her grave

sizzling in the afternoon inferno;

no trees, no shade. Back in the ‘70s,

when Alice Walker discovered

the burial site, it was overgrown,

filled with snakes, but that’s all

cleared away. The headstone reads:

Zora Neale Hurston

“A Genius of the South”

1901 – 1960

Novelist, Folklorist,

Anthropologist

Date of birth ten years off – classic Zora.

Under the scrolled informational marker,

assorted plastic blooms stuck in the soil,

cheery, but faded. This is what it comes to.

Genius in the dirt. Fake flowers. Bones

quietly crumbling. A shelf of books in some

white woman’s library. But what mattered:

dancing in gin joints, the fine-featured

beaus, rambling freedom, really living,

a lip-smacking good time. Forget

rest, heaven or no. Her ghost hovers

above the granite slate, heels tapping

out a cha-cha-cha, before she curtsies,

full of play, flashing that megawatt smile.