September 23rd/Love Poem/Homage
by YVETTE MURRAY
in Spring 2019
Aziza Gibson-Hunter, "Bone Dust Dance," 2013-14
September 23rd
From a dark, grey canopy the rain fell
Fierce onto humanity that Saturday.
Life following death and death chasing life
Within the circle we humans had built.
Onto a funeral it fell
Onto a wedding it fell
Then the sun broke the clouds
Bringing hope to the desolate
Revelers and the festive mourners.
All within duality of living.
Onto a funeral it fell
Onto a wedding it fell
That day was sublime; surreal. It
wore misery and joy as an ill-fitting hat.
Memories now enshrined
Tenderly like fresh water in cupped hands.
Onto a funeral it fell
Onto a wedding it fell
Twenty four hours make a day.
Given the same name every
Twenty four hours. Each today is its own:
Whole and delicate as the egg not yet laid
Love Poem
The tiniest tear
destroys all the fabric.
No, not destroys.
Obliterates,
Eradicates,
Annihilates,
Reduces the once Great into
Absolutely nothing.
And returns it without mercy From whence it came.
This abject darkness.
This hardening of the Spirit
Has had many names
As it traveled with mankind
Throughout the millennia
Dragging souls over rocks
Leaving bloodied corpses and
Violated women in its wake.
Never able to put even one rock Onto another.
For that choose Philia or Agape.
Some carry them in an ark.
Timeless armor bearers for our souls:
A quasar within foulness.
They power resurrection of the living,
reincarnate the lost and
help a soul survive dark epidemics.
They are a balm for a scraped heart,
And will mend torn fabric.
Stopping grief and fueling our survival.
Homage
In the middle of any night
One Jimmy Choo stiletto lies on the floor.
Rain pours against twelfth story windows.
The soiree is over and passion complete.
A misplaced corporate girl tosses like flotsam.
Against a background of snoring
And Egyptian cotton sheets
This nightmare rages:
Her footprints as they vanish from
Palmetto lined streets.
Spray from the Atlantic drying
On her pecan brown skin.
A flavor she can hardly recall.
Ingredients forgotten.
Many magnolia scented seasons have gone
And the impasse hovers.
Stiff pillow of regret. Of this she dreams:
Picaninny braids
We used to call them
Thick, knotted diadems of ancestry
Lay patiently on our necks.
We would run around without shirts
And nobody cared.
And the sun,
the sun would place
Bronze brushstrokes
On our flat nipples.
Tea parties, not in Boston,
But Memphis and Charleston
Were our social scene,
Stickforks and mud pies.
We knew just whom to invite.
Fishnet stockins and hair’s all pressed.
Black patent leather shoes clickin’
In the back pew of Mother Emanuel A.M.E. church.
Yvette R. Murray puts words on paper as a matter of necessity. The words simply refuse to be unheard and demand that she give them their place in posterity. She is a Gullah Geechee woman from Charleston, South Carolina who takes history and wraps it in the honey of poetry and prose.