Billie Dee's
Electronic Poetry
Anthology
R. T. Smith
R. T. Smith is editor of Shenandoah.
Please sign my guestbook
Zion, Vernacular Exposure, Mockingbird Song
I won't forget the museum -- it was in Mississippi,
it was winter, snow covering the pastures
like cotton never could -- and the photographs
in black and white by a local amteur shutterbug
with an unerring eye covered an off-white wall,
the grainy prints framed with minimal chrome.
The wind outside was wild, something out of Job,
which seemed right, its white-out affliction
of window just beside the largest portrait.
Hair like spangle-ice and five o'clock frost
grizzling his face, a black granddaddy dressed
in hospital whites leaned forward in the wicker seat
of his ladder-back chair and stared into the pages
of a Bible wide open in his lap. I could see
the spine was broken, pages ragged and thin
as Kleenex. His lips were half open in a whisper,
as if giving breath to the scripture, warming
that wilderness of sticks the alphabet cools to
when no one's there to witness. I hope I'll always
remember to love that shine the sunlight
and an inch of Tri-X film caught in his old eyes --
grace radiant, as if he'd seen angels in silver
spread their wings. The caption chosen
by the camera man or curator
was "Cramming for the Finals," which left me
weak-kneed and hearing my grandma's soprano
reach from "blessed assurance" to "glory divine"
with her small-town Georgia drawl, while
snowflakes like words of a hesitant holy message
whirled beyond the panes. Now, just drifting,
looking up the the Dell laptop balanced across
my knees and trying to think beyond thinking,
I see March manna blowing in huge tatters
above the yellow flowers, and the orchard
mockingbird shivers, extends one wing's
extravagance of white and pewter to sing what,
as we still say down here -- because the vernacular
is what the oracle trusts to heat the alphabet up --
might could be my name.
-- Poetry, 1/2000
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