~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Jazz Night
      —Karen Tarlton’s New Orleans Jazz Night

The horse drawing a buggy
clattering its hooves rhythmically,

the horseman dozing and
dipping his head,

a young couple pacing hand in hand
down the street shining with neon signs,

a bucket drummer at the curb
beating night into a carnival,

two musicians blowing saxophones
outside a jazz club,

the moon roaming from Jackson Square
to Bourbon Street, pausing

now and then as if something
deserves peeking,

and drifting to pose atop the steeple
of the St. Louis Cathedral.

Jack hopping onto a streetcar
grumbling to Harrah’s

to see a golden statue of Louis Armstrong
in the lobby.

On his mind, his grandma,
once a singer in the Armstrong band,

singing a jazz song, her voice
a black and white of the ’30s.

The Worn Path
      —After Dorothea Lange’s Ex-Slave with Long Memory, Alabama, 1938

Memory is a long worn path
treaded by this old black woman
who holds a cane and
looks back at her footprints,

her eyes filled with hardships
of day and night and
year after year which become
her strong will to walk forward.