Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining
Poems
Mark Wagenaar
- 114 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining
Poems
Mark Wagenaar
About This Book
In his third collection, the award-winning author crafts poems that "reckon with the sins of history and the human-made scars on the natural world" (Beth Ann Fennelly, Poet Laureate of Mississippi). Winner of the 2016 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining explores the South and its history through the eyes of the living, the dead, and the inbetween. "The songs of Charles Wright, Rilke, and Blind Willie Johnson have tuned Wagenaar's ear, but the music is his own, irresistibly so. Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining is a brave and difficult grappling, ending with the difficult joy of a child's birth and the world's subsequent remaking. This is, simply put, poetry that adds to the glory of the human endeavor." âBeth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling "In Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining, there is a rapturous beauty that encompasses the American South, the United States, and the world, a poetic rooted in the space around the poet and extending outward to the world with questioning, compassion, grief, and hope." âAfaa M. Weaver, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award "The speaker searches constantly for evidence of God's presence in the world. It is a book of doubt just as much as it is a book of faith. Indeed, doubt threatens, at every line break, to wrest faith from the speaker's hands. But books of doubt are books of faith, and Southern Tongues understands this." â Los Angeles Review of Books
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II
TROUBLE WILL SOON BE OVER
MISSISSIPPI TONGUES: A POEM IN NINE PARTS
I went down to the church house
I got down on my bended knee
I prayed, I prayed all night, I prayed
Deacon Jones, pray for me
I. Southern Divinations
bluejay, something whitewinged, beside the rocker on the front porch.
near it, sun-brindled bodies like a funeral pyre in timeâs slow flame.
A perfect circle of raised white welts: yes, there will be enough
from the branches of a young oak: yes, sheâll come back someday.
of cicadas in the trees, a hundred ratchets spinning on the car
got another one of the chickens. A mimosa drops its flares
of other towns. Other tongues, older tongues. Issaquena, Choctaw
tiger lilies blazing on their wicks in the ditch. Issaquena.
buckshot soil, bottomland. Ghost towns, ghost tongues, we, too,
dry bones, this county will rise again, our neighbor rumbles, the one who wears
of rattlers. Ache of crepe myrtle blossoms by the road, white ones, fuchsia,
what can a body keep, what can a body bear? You must ask yourself,
have gone into both without an answer. Benthic ourselves,
on the air, we bear the light of names no one knows how to say anymore.
II. Whatâs the Last Thing that Goes Through a Bugâs Head
hits the Natchez Trace: foot-smoothed path
from Natchez to Nashville: hundred-foot pines,
Pegasus & Lyra-blossomed magnolia, crepe myrtles
like burning cars roadside: his half-limp almost
the same as my fatherâs,
one we ask instead of asking about our own
last words, last questions, even at this lonely
outpost, where rusty ceiling fans chase their tails
all day, & a mini pagoda of disposable cameras,
each with their own
on the counter to a dog-eared Psalm 88,
& mahalath leannoth (to be read at the suffering
of afflictions) circled in red: a lineage that begins
with a half-limp, & goes back generations
of Primitive Baptists,
of one day into the next: what we are heir to,
what we are at the mercy of: Old Trace, what flickers
in the blood? : something kin to the twenty centuries
of dark in the Pharr Mounds, burial tumuli a few miles
from this place:
how long this season of white hair, how long
will Yahweh stay silent: how much of this galaxyâs
light, this river of heaven, is the light of white dwarfs:
dead stars: where else do death & eros collide
in the world: burst sacks
for the right wind out of the cypress swamps
to carry the seeds: as we wait, halfhearted, off-balance,
for something beyond us to carry us, to get us
through another day, to bear these frailtiesâ
III. Southern Locution (Erasures)
IV. Mama Janâs Advice for This Life
Weâll spend our days tracing those hands on this gravel road
at dayâs end, whitetail hour, with the tiger lilies dying in a ditch,
& Issaquena County clay. Go on, do a Google search:
Issaquena County jail, & Issaquena County prison.
& half tons (half-pints of clear shine beneath the seat)
in heavenâs side, itâs been worn in a little at a time,
When the children grow up, theyâll break
Weâve seven types of rattlers, & how many kinds of luck?
in buckshot soil, & water on the way to the Delta. Find somebody.
he once brought me a glass of water when I was coughing
Find somebody that ten...