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  • Requiem
  • Yusef Komunyakaa (bio)

So,when the strong unholy high windswhiplashed over the sold-off marshlandseaten back to a sigh of saltwater,the Crescent City was already shook down to her pilings,her floating ribs, her spleen & backbone,left trembling in her Old World facades& postmodern lethargy, lost to waterloggedmemories & quitclaim deeds,exposed for all eyes, damnablegaze & lamentation—plumb line& heartthrob, ballast & watertable—already the last ghost songof the Choctaw & the Chickasawwas long gone, no more than a drunken curseamong the oak & sweet gum leaves, a tallyof broken treaties & absences echoingcries of birds over the barrier islandsinherited by the remittance man, scalawag,& King Cotton, & already the sky was falling in on itself,calling like a cloud of seagullsgone ravenous as the Gulfreclaiming its ebb & flowchartwhile the wind banged on shutters& unhinged doors from their frames& unshingled the low-ridged roofswhile the believers hummed"Precious Lord" & "Deep River"as the horse-hair plaster wallsgalloped along with the surge,already folklore began to rise upfrom the buried lallygag & sluicepulsing beneath the Big Easyrolling between & through itself,caught in some downward tug [End Page 484] & turn, like a world of love affairsbacked up in a stalled inlet,a knelt-down army of cypress,a testament to how men dreamt landout of water, where bedrockwas only the heart's bump& grind, its deep, dark churn& acceleration, blowzy downto those unmoored timbers,already nothing but watermumbling as the great turbulent eyelingered on a primordial question,then turned—the gauzy genitalia of Bacchus& Zulu left dangling from magnolias & raintrees,already… [End Page 485]

Yusef Komunyakaa

Yusef Komunyakaa, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, is Distinguished Senior Poet and Professor in the Creative Writing Program and the Council of Humanities at New York University. He is author of more than twelve books of poems, including Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems, 1975–1999, Talking Dirty to the Gods, Thieves of Paradise, and Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Part 1. For his poetry, he has also received numerous other prizes and awards, including the Thomas Forcade award, the William Faulkner Prize from the University of Rennes in France, the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine, the Hanes Poetry Prize, and the Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award.

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