Anna Douglass Dreams She Is a Bird over Baltimore: 1877
- Anna Douglass Dreams She Is a Bird over Baltimore: 1877
this water a devilish glass trying to speaksee how it comes and comes, forward see how it tries, scrubs,leans, readies itself for reading and in the endit will only rage and offer up its stink mixall our wishes with its blood with skinthe sky crawls out of to live youngagain stir the mud from God's toes and that, all settledand blessed, is what its smell amounts towhat water gives us back what tunesthe marshes dapples ourunderskin what makes us want to runoutside the yards and straps that drive us straighta kind of key [End Page 17]
M. Nzadi Keita (waterdawta@yahoo.com) has read her poetry in universities, prisons, kindergartens, and on public television. Her work has appeared in publications such as American Poetry Review, nocturnes literary review, and the anthologies The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South, Beyond the Frontier: African-American Poetry for the Twenty-First Century, and Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam. Some of Keita's most fruitful research on Anna Murray Douglass has taken place while visiting Douglass's grave in Rochester, sitting on her porch in Washington, DC, and walking the Baltimore harbor. Keita teaches at Ursinus College.
Footnotes
Note: Anna Murray Douglass (1813-1882) was a woman considered conventionally illiterate, who left no direct paper trail, and whose famously literate husband—abolitionist and women's rights advocate—recognizes her in just a handful of his many sentences.
