This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Nov 17, 2010 - Although Missouri was originally a neutral state and not part of the Confederacy, much of our state sympathized with the South and tried to secede from the Union. We should have no trouble, then, sympathizing with this poem by a transplanted southerner who remembers the South as only a southerner could -- steeped in sanctified glory and surrounded by the bones of history.
Excerpt from Cradle Song
When I was four, we drove to Nashville,
Grand Ole Opry-bound, and stopped
the night at a broken down motel
in Tennessee -- shag walls,
mossy carpet, dank concrete --
and I remember standing in
the doorway as evening fell,
a busful of believers rattling their way
to the pool for a makeshift
baptism, the Amens and Hear us, Lords
ricocheting through the courtyard
as underwater lights glowed
the pool algae green.
They would come to him, the big
preacher man, and he'd lay
a palm across their foreheads, brace
them at the small of their backs.
They'd release themselves to him:
teethsucking the air before
falling back into salvation,
held under unstruggling and
splashing up anew all gasping
grace and sanctified glory
hallelujah til my mother shut the door
and made me watch tv.
My parents don't recall it,
but that's the way
memory works in the South--
the truth is always lying
in some field somewhere between
the bones of the fallen
and the weapons they reach for.
Stacey Lynn Brown is the author of the book-length poem "Cradle Song," which was published by C&R Press in 2009. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.
To learn more about River Styx, click here. Richard Newman, River Styx editor for 15 years, is the author of two full-length poetry collections, "Borrowed Towns" and "Domestic Fugues." He also co-directs the River Styx at Duff's reading series.