~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Philip C. Kolin

The Betrayal of the Sultana

        One of the worst maritime disasters in American history. Marion, Arkansas,

                      April 27, 1865

Sultana, you 260 foot, four deck high,

sidewheel paddleboat, you were sold out

by your captain's Judas bribe to squeeze

2,400 Union soldiers just released

from Andersonville into a new hellhole—

in a space for 376 men.

When the boilers blew, they fired

shrapnel-like steam at the men

on the upper decks and also

on the lower ones.

In bad health, the Union soldiers had to jump

into the chilly, fast-moving Mississippi currents

or were pulled under and pushed so far away

their faded blue corpses surfaced downstream

months later.

Your shipwreck received scant attention

in the Yankee press at the end of the war

or was crowded onto the back page.

And your previous rebel foes

on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi

who made rafts to save your cargo

received even less notice.

When a Drought Stole the Mississippi

                        October, 2022

A jealous drought stole away

the Mississippi at Memphis.

All the tributaries went into hibernation,

and the floodgates came down with lockjaw.

The river's become a forsaken woman

her uncharted sadness cast upon the river bottom

revealing mud thickets, rotten hulls, abandoned

anchors, a graveyard for crayfish gasping

as they flipflop in a desert of sandbars.

The river's rippling currents gone now

and her black combed waves. No more

fishing, just memories of Huck Finn

casting his pole out from the shoreline.

On Beale Street bluesmen play Handy's

"Memphis Blues," their notes falling

like rain hoping to sing the river back.

Philip C. Kolin is the Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus and Editor Emeritus of the Southern Quarterly at the University of Southern Mississippi. He has published over 40 books on Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, and African American playwrights and also including 15 poetry collections, the most being Delta Tears: Poems (Main Street Rag, 2020), Americorona: Poems about the Pandemic (Wipf and Stock, 2021), and forthcoming Mapping Trauma: Poems about Black History (Third World Press, Spring 2023).