Bearers of Arms 1775-1783

I.

Body-cargo.

Organs rise to forefront of skeletal cave.

From dust to this

damp, wooden cavity.

      What worth in bones and flesh?

Cartographers ready. It will begin here and end there.
Continents new with bootprints.

Land cleared of human-refuse. That one can make another into.
And become root-torn, clown-face, muled-man.

       __________________

The body grows out of an ear.      Savage.

Too conspicuous in tall grass.      Native.

Rippled and shiny to carry.      Warrior.

Incongruent sounds erupt from mouths.      Speaks a vulgar tongue.

Stored in Jefferson's house--like so many paper boxes in pantry.

That skin which absorbs sunlight

could stand to deaden, be deadened.

Looming sickle, patient.
      Run.
Something deliberate at risk.
      Run.
Hint given.
A song is no longer a song.

       __________________

To where cities were not yet built.

In honor of dirt roads that will become.

What idea in that hope of institutions?

The bitter irony on tongues
rips at what would be comedy
to join the chant
"liberty, liberty"
in "thoughtless imitation."

Men with hands that look like men's hands.

Skins silken in southern sun. Not an absence of. Excess.

       __________________

This equation:
Two hundred freed, four thousand enslaved.
Hands that can wave, but do not.
Feet that are not silent, but dare not speak.
Quest of interior articulated in dead darkness,
candelabra burning in farthest corner.

This reprisal.
Lone pen scratches fortunes onto meaningful paper.
      Deal scratched in whole of throat.
      An exchange for being executioner.
      Had worn uniform with flag,
      bore down into grunting earth,

          for tentative freedom.

Dawn Lundy Martin is studying for the PhD degree in English literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has a Master's degree in English/creative writing from San Francisco State University. Dawn is working on her first collection of poems titled Other Americas.

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