Midland by Kwame Dawes

Author:Kwame Dawes
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780821440926
Publisher: Ohio University Press

Memory of a Garden

The dignified mourners, blued

by the waning light, shawled in silk,

transparent as their sorrow, crawl

through the meandering paths of this garden,

while a woman makes flowers grow with the care

of a bent back, a head bandaged in ivory,

the language of her floral pattern,

carmine like wine against the godly

cobalt—it is as if the dappled grace

of the blooms she husbands have infected her skin

with their stippled light and she is nothing

but an apparition in this garden, as the mourners,

in their somber fabrics of mauve and the

bleeding spots of lament, grow pale as death,

eyes as hollow as the rented cave of miracles.

A voice gathers the dusk about them;

no light in the strummed guitar, just the groan

of low chords. It is a song of flower buds turning black

on an April night, branches frosted white like lepers;

of farmers who fret in the glow of yellow bonfires

that flicker between their contorted peach trees

with their miserly warmth against the cold air.

The song is the dull gray of a country’s death,

its history caught in this sunfall.

The women continue their dirge-rigid walk

through the plague of flowers while the light

wavers over the bent gardener,

her open palms loam-dark in the gloom.

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