Midland

Poems

Kwame Dawes

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2000
• eBook ISBN: 9780821440926
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

The winning manuscript of the fourth annual Hollis Summers Poetry Prize is also the exciting American debut by a poet who has already established himself as an important international poetic voice. Midland, the seventh collection by Kwame Dawes, draws deeply on the poet's travels and experiences in Africa, the Caribbean, England, and the American South. Marked equally by a lushness of imagery, an urgency of tone, and a muscular rhythm, Midland, in the words of the final judge, Eavan Boland, is "a powerful testament of the complexity, pain, and enrichment of inheritance…It is a compelling meditation on what is given and taken away in the acts of generation and influence. Of a father's example and his oppression. There are different places throughout the book. They come willfully in and out of the poems: Jamaica. London. Africa. America. But all the places become one place in the central theme and undersong here: which is displacement…The achievement of this book is a beautifully crafted voice which follows the painful and vivid theme of homelessness in and out of the mysteries of loss and belonging."

Midland is the work of a keen and transcendent intellect, a collection of poems that speaks to the landscape from inside, from an emotional and experiential place of risk and commitment.

IV

Home Town

I followed you to this characterless place, you call it home,
the rough parcels of open acres, a solitary barn in the distance,
and the ubiquitous dwarfed bushes of tobacco.
I have grown accustomed to the flatness of the land, the clean
horizon, and the musty armpitting of our vulnerable bodies.
The sky is bare-faced and incapable of duplicity.

You are weeping because this landscape is a monument
to your miseries—the things you never speak about,
not till now, anyway. There are dead bones in the soil,
you tell me, and these paths, scarring the fertile earth,
sometimes whisper the magic of sorcery at nightfall.
Already the urge to move on. We are failing
at love again, our bodies turned from each other,
and there is stern regret in your eyes when I look.
I feel as if I am being crowded by alien tongues:
what you say to this earth is not easily translated.

In the coolest corner of this restaurant, smelling heavy
of two-day-old collards and a generation of sweat in its walls
we pull at the white flesh of battered fried fish. I carry my mood

like a shield before me, a badge to protect me from the distance of language.

We say little, rehearsing the embarrassment of your crying. The bare
landscape outside the window is perfectly balanced, the weight
of an old oak on the right tilting the bland sky upright again.

Parasite

The silence etched into their skin is also mine.

Yusef Komunyakaa

I dress in secret, discarding my exile skin.
I constantly pat my pocket to feel the comfort
of my utility accent, exotic as a slenteng threnody,
talisman of my alien self, to stand out visible against
the ghostly horde of native sons, their hands slicing the air
in spastic language. I too am disappearing in the mist—a dear price
for feasting on the dead with their thick scent of history.

It is easy in this place to grow comfortable
with the equations that position the land,
the green of tobacco, the scent of magnolia,
the choke-hold, piss-yellow spread of kudzu, so heavy
it bends the chain link fence dividing 277;
the stench of wisteria crawling its pale purple
path through a dying swamp. I hear myself turning
heir to the generation that understood the smell
of burning flesh, the grammar of a stare, the flies
of the dead, undisturbed in an open field. My burden
is far easier, it’s true. I have not acquired a taste for chitlins
and grits, but I wear well the livery of ageless anger and quiet
resolve like the chameleon of suffering I am.

Libation

For Ellen

Here is the image of puppies sniffing aspens, garlanded
with rotten leaves so late in winter— Dogwoods, she says.
It’s the season of Christ’s bleeding, and those dogwoods were planted
as an epitaph to the old actor who howled his lines to empty houses—
before they bore him off on a stage flat, dead.

She tells me of the scarlet ooze of crushed dogwood roots,
this ink used to scratch out poems of lost love on the smooth
white of North Carolina birch. Here in the South
at the bleak end of February I turn bewildered, I find comfort
in the simple affinities of skin, sin, and suffering. I sing tentatively,
knowing too well the warm scent of blood-washed Baptist hymns.

In this fertile loam, new earth to me, the seeds I plant
grow too quickly into sores, septic melons bursting
into startling rot—like overfed guppies.

The dogwood in the wind speckles the bewildered puppies.
I pray among the leaves, pouring libation to thaw the earth.

Tornado Child

For Rosalie Richardson

I am a tornado child.

I come like a swirl of black and darken up your day;

I whip it all into my womb, lift you and your things,

carry you to where you’ve never been, and maybe,

if I feel good, I might bring you back, all warm and scared,

heart humming wild like a bird after early sudden flight.

I am a tornado child.

I tremble at the elements. When thunder rolls my womb

trembles, remembering the tweak of contractions

that tightened to a wail when my mother pushed me out

into the black of a tornado night.

I am a tornado child,

you can tell us from far, by the crazy of our hair;

couldn’t tame it if we tried. Even now I tie a bandanna

to silence the din of anarchy in these coir-thick plaits.

I am a tornado child

born in the whirl of clouds; the center crumbled,

then I came. My lovers know the blast of my chaotic giving;

they tremble at the whip of my supple thighs;

you cross me at your peril, I swallow light

when the warm of anger lashes me into a spin,

the pine trees bend to me swept in my gyrations.

I am a tornado child.

When the spirit takes my head, I hurtle into the vacuum

of white sheets billowing and paint a swirl of color,

streaked with my many songs.

Satta: En Route to Columbia, S.C.

I-Roy rides the gap
where the sax used to rest
and the bass talking
to the Royal man who
can turn a rhyme into sacredness

Want to chant damnation
where my enemies gawk
at the tumbling enjambments
ramming home a truth

Who who who can say
concubine! like tracing
out the wicked’s path to hell
like I-Royal, mouth shooting fire?

So, satta a massa
says the prophet
cool like a knife edge
and then catch the cross
stick tacking a rhythm
satta a massa gana

I am striding through an alien
landscape, the road smooth
the air heavy with rain
and my heart bluesing along
when the prophet speaks
and it is enough for the grooves
of a forty-five’s glimmering vinyl
the comfort of God again on me

Look into the book of life and you will see
that there’s a land far far away

Belle

For C.M.T.

Her body is no longer tender, but her mind is free.

Rita Dove

On Devine beside the Tea Room she looks over the moral city,

so old, it has forgotten itself. Her white underpants

of practical cotton are pegged for the sun

and my straying eyes. I have seen her black bras,

startled by their garishness; knowing that she chooses

her wardrobe for this break with tradition, for the neighbors

and silly voyeurs, too afraid to know her when they meet,

who peep for a sign of her flesh in the simplest things,

the scent of her in the flitting fabrics, her laughter

shimmering through the corridors, the texture of her lips

after a sip of iced tea; the dialect of desire in her eyes.

I collect these things, too afraid to speak to her.

Alone now, after leaving him, the farm, and twenty years

of faithful duty, she hangs her things out to dry

defying the neighborly ordinances, the indecency of airing

the collective linen of a people in the unflinching sun.

But in the softer part of night, she feels the absence

of normal things, like a cough, a whisper, someone else’s smell,

and she worries about the neighbors, the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• I
• II
• III
• IV
• Notes