Afterimages (1997)

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Poetry

   I

However the image enters

its force remains within

my eyes

rockstrewn caves where dragonfish evolve  

wild for life, relentless and acquisitive  

learning to survive

where there is no food

my eyes are always hungry

and remembering

however the image enters

its force remains.

A white woman stands bereft and empty

a black boy hacked into a murderous lesson  

recalled in me forever

like a lurch of earth on the edge of sleep  

etched into my visions

food for dragonfish that learn

to live upon whatever they must eat

fused images beneath my pain.

   II

The Pearl River floods through the streets of Jackson  

A Mississippi summer televised.

Trapped houses kneel like sinners in the rain

a white woman climbs from her roof to a passing boat  

her fingers tarry for a moment on the chimney  

now awash

tearless and no longer young, she holds  

a tattered baby's blanket in her arms.

In a flickering afterimage of the nightmare rain  

a microphone

thrust up against her flat bewildered words

         “we jest come from the bank yestiddy  

                  borrowing money to pay the income tax  

                  now everything's gone. I never knew  

                  it could be so hard.”

Despair weighs down her voice like Pearl River mud  

caked around the edges

her pale eyes scanning the camera for help or explanation

unanswered

she shifts her search across the watered street, dry-eyed  

                  “hard, but not this hard.”

Two tow-headed children hurl themselves against her  

hanging upon her coat like mirrors

until a man with ham-like hands pulls her aside  

snarling “She ain't got nothing more to say!”

and that lie hangs in his mouth

like a shred of rotting meat.

   III

I inherited Jackson, Mississippi.

For my majority it gave me Emmett Till  

his 15 years puffed out like bruises  

on plump boy-cheeks

his only Mississippi summer

whistling a 21 gun salute to Dixie

as a white girl passed him in the street  

and he was baptized my son forever  

in the midnight waters of the Pearl.

His broken body is the afterimage of my 21st year

when I walked through a northern summer

my eyes averted

from each corner's photographies  

newspapers protest posters magazines  

Police Story, Confidential, True  

the avid insistence of detail

pretending insight or information

the length of gash across the dead boy's loins

his grieving mother's lamentation  

the severed lips, how many burns  

his gouged out eyes

sewed shut upon the screaming covers  

louder than life

all over

the veiled warning, the secret relish  

of a black child's mutilated body  

fingered by street-corner eyes  

bruise upon livid bruise

and wherever I looked that summer

I learned to be at home with children's blood

with savored violence

with pictures of black broken flesh  

used, crumpled, and discarded  

lying amid the sidewalk refuse  

like a raped woman's face.

A black boy from Chicago

whistled on the streets of Jackson, Mississippi

testing what he'd been taught was a manly thing to do

his teachers

ripped his eyes out his sex his tongue

and flung him to the Pearl weighted with stone

in the name of white womanhood

they took their aroused honor

back to Jackson

and celebrated in a whorehouse

the double ritual of white manhood

confirmed.

   IV

   “If earth and air and water do not judge them who are

     we to refuse a crust of bread?”

     

Emmett Till rides the crest of the Pearl, whistling

24 years his ghost lay like the shade of a raped woman  

and a white girl has grown older in costly honor  

(what did she pay to never know its price?)

now the Pearl River speaks its muddy judgment  

and I can withhold my pity and my bread.

           “Hard, but not this hard.”

Her face is flat with resignation and despair  

with ancient and familiar sorrows

a woman surveying her crumpled future

as the white girl besmirched by Emmett's whistle  

never allowed her own tongue

without power or conclusion

unvoiced

she stands adrift in the ruins of her honor  

and a man with an executioner's face

pulls her away.

Within my eyes

the flickering afterimages of a nightmare rain

a woman wrings her hands

beneath the weight of agonies remembered

I wade through summer ghosts  

betrayed by vision

hers and my own

becoming dragonfish to survive  

the horrors we are living

with tortured lungs

adapting to breathe blood.

A woman measures her life's damage

my eyes are caves, chunks of etched rock

tied to the ghost of a black boy  

whistling

crying and frightened

her tow-headed children cluster  

like little mirrors of despair  

their father's hands upon them  

and soundlessly

a woman begins to weep.

Summary

Author

Racism Issue


Reference

  1. Lorde, Audre. 1997. “Afterimages” from The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde. Reprinted with the permission of Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

[[Category: Anti-Black Racism in Literature]]