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Callaloo 24.3 (2001) 753-754



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from Vol. 19, No. 1 (Winter 1996)

The Great Depression

Kendra Hamilton


She has no desire. She has a ring,
a ring on her hand that she twists
and twists again. She has a word,
one word in her chest that pushes
its way on an ache of air to her tongue.
But she does not speak it, will not
say its name. Here where she sits
she cannot see the corn, spreading its arms,
Twisting its way up the rope
of the sun, or the cotton's brazen
white blooms. She cannot see the men
in the field or the stone from the field
they were clearing. So many stones,
egg white, flinty grey, pink flecked
sun warmed, black with blood.
There were three shots from the field
That day. For the women at the well
it was a signal they knew, knew like the snake's
hiss from the deeps of the hawthorn
thicket, and they hurried away. She stood
dreaming at the hand crank, listening
to the bucket suspended below,
the creak of hemp, the plash of thick water
clover honey brown, and the flies,
Bottle blue and thick as her thumb,
buzzing loud as mowers. Later,
they told her what happened to Sweet,
his fall from the wagon, the stone arching
to meet him. How no one moved, then all
moved at once. They told her this, those
hard men, faces like teak, hands of tree
bark, tears standing in their leaf brown eyes. [End Page 753]
Now it is she who does not move.
She's ill, she knows; they do not
make her work, slap her hands
from the biscuit dough, say she'll curdle
the milk in the churn. She spends her
afternoons on the porch where the wind
in the pines seems a live thing bent
on thrashing all the bobwhites and
whippoorwills from their nests.
They complain so loudly the voice
of the child at her knee disappears--
disappears into the radio's buzz, the low
song of women, disappears
into the scraping of cicadas,
the hot, hot tongue of longing.
The sun.



Kendra Hamilton, a candidate for the PhD degree in English at the University of Virginia, is a poet, essayist, playwright, and journalist. Her poetry and nonfiction prose have appeared most recently in Brightleaf, Southern Cultures, and Callaloo.

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