Song, Without a Musical Note for My Granddaddy
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Knee-deep in heaped okra, who needed English? The goitrous squashes sat by a rusted hoe. You watched a doe-eyed Jesus with a servile hush, then rapped the ground with your emphatic “Oh,
well, Sir Lord, Amen!” Squatting over russet earth, you hoisted feed and reaped greens all week, voice bamming the yard before you’d cross it, singing about that lucky ol’ sun rolling up the blue and back.
You begged no more from this meager life, than to lean forward, to earn, to eat, though your past might have bled you dry. Ma said you never looked back, as if, at turning, you might vanish into shreds
when you trudged headlong into both wars. In a lock-box, under yellowed conscription tickets, memories sat like a tangle of barbed wire, dark as cropped thickets.
One torpid winter, 1982, the windows were iced with Florida’s first frost. I was your baby bird, your cockatoo, not knowing what would be the cost. [End Page 1001]
Natalie Graham, a Cave Canem Fellow, received the MFA in creative writing from the University of Florida. Currently she is a University Distinguished Fellow in the American studies doctoral program at Michigan State University. She is also completing her first volume of poems, The Perfect Body. She has published poems in Valley Voices: A Literary Review and New England Review.
