MIRANDA REMEMBERS CUBA, 1974

I.

Right before my mother burned the house down,

she tended the roses. Each day that summer, she came wearing the

pale yellow dress, floppy hat, and holding the red tool box.

If I was in the yard, she’d yell:

Miranda, me voy para la pega, which was a big joke between us,

because she was pretending to leave for an office in Havana.

We were the work—the house, the loud children, the inscrutable father.

The pleasure was in the roses.

In the year Castro said, after fifteen years of Revolution,

women’s rights are an arena in which we are still behind,”

my mother’s flowers bloomed.

Everywhere the pink Monticello shrub roses shed their frosty skins.

In the garden, zinc-colored J.F.K. tea roses chortled.

On the patio, geranium red Floribunda roses spat through cracks.

Running the trellis of the house, the scarlet Altissimo climbed.

In the garden, my mother would push the trowel deep,

deep into the ground around the bushes,

elbow-high gloves gargantuan on the slender arms,

head tilted like a sunflower, legs spread,

and the sharp sucking against the teeth—

the hiss when she forgot the danger of roses.

II.

On the last day of the killings, the fields burned.

All around, the terror of chickens, some headless and running,

others on the metal tables—where the hardest part of all—

much harder than the chopping of heads—(which was really quite routine),

was the pulling of wing feathers and hairs from the anus.

The easiest part?

Chopping the oil gland out, halving the chicken

and clunking the heart and lungs into the silver bowl.

III.

The morning it happened, the day, up on hind legs

the sun, hot as a whip, clouds rolling in, paella burning the stove.

All the roses were cut down.

Hundreds and still hundreds of flaming heads jutted the red wheelbarrows

And my mother, standing in front of the house, her hands turning clothespins

over and over, her face blank.

In the punishing heat, the blush-stained blossoms dripped.

The sky pulled back, everything, black.

© Michelle Courtney Berry

Horticulture Adds Poetry to Editorial Features
Source: forum.hortmag.com

Horticulture, the oldest and most respected magazine for avid gardeners in North America, is pleased to announce the addition of poetry to its editorial features. Cave Canem fellow (and fellow gardener) Michelle Courtney Berry’s “What I Learned in the Garden” has been chosen as the debut poem, to appear in the April 2009 issue and online at Hortmag.com.

For over 100 years, Horticulture has been dedicated to celebrating the passion of avid, influential gardeners, and there is an even longer history of poetry inspired by flowers and gardens — from William Blake to Louise Glück, and so many great poets between them. Adding garden verse to our editorial mix is simply another way to celebrate and encourage a real passion for gardening.

Horticulture is accepting submissions on a rolling basis, and is seeking poetry about, related to, or in honor of gardeners and gardening: traditional forms and free verse, the meditative lyric and the “light” or comic poem, the work of the famous and the work of the unknown. Our one limitation is length; we are unable to publish very long poems, and our limit is 42 lines. Submissions should be sent as an email attachment (.DOC or .RTF only) per the guidelines posted at http://www.hortmag.com/submissions/ informative …

April 2009 issue to contain first poetry

“In Weedsport” was first published by Wells College Press with an accompanying photo by Rebecca Mello Eagan taken at the Montezuma Wildlife Refuge. It was printed in honor of my reading at Wells College on October 22, 2001.  In the first play I wrote, directed and scored (“Song for Root and River”) this poem was featured as well. However, it was called “Purple River” at the time. I still go back and forth re: which title I prefer.

Ironically, the Wells campus is about 20 miles south of my father’s birthplace. Naturally, I read this poem, with tears in my eyes, in tribute to my father on that fall evening several years ago.

In Weedsport

Daddy’s house still stands, juice jar on the stoop

clouded over windows, the yard wild with the ache of Negroes.

We stare til the sky falls down.

He says he had to come here one last time

to remember the year he left home—all he owned in both hands—

letter from Tuskegee, the blue suitcase with the sturdy handle.

On the road he remembers, the scratch of muslin,

the clasp of a briefcase and the sound of a door creaking shut.

He passes the all-white school that held the three Negroes:

Victor, Norris and he. Daddy’s the middle child

The one who mastered sports—the captain of every

Weedsport team, the good speller.

But go figure! he said, no matter good the brothers

there were still the daily fists and fighting,

Fighting to beat back words like

No good niggers.

He forgets how many buses

he takes to Alabama,

but there, he remembers

how delicious the feeling,

how wondrous to see so much of his own skin!

how quickly he fits in.

Today, my father sighs with memory,

cancer’s got him a grip so tight he trusts it more than anything.

I take his bony hand.

Somewhere in Tuskegee, a purple river surges.

It knows my father,

it knows my father in all the ways I never could.

Michelle Courtney Berry

For two summers thereafter, I’d return to this same poem, but couldn’t finish it. Finally, in the summer of 2003, I found an ending while attending the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont. A year later “How My Father Prepared Me,” was published by The Ithaca Journal and Gannett Newspapers in honor of my selection as the second Poet Laureate of Tompkins County in 2005.

This poem is one of my favorites, because it blends my father’s sly wit, stubbornness, athleticism and his habit of demonstrating love through action.  Special thanks to the current 2009 poet laureate of Tompkins County, Jay Leeming, for his wonderful suggestions on how to end this poem. Jay, I’m glad I took your advice!

How My Father Prepared Me

When I was eleven

My father felt I needed some sort of coming of age experience.

Two years shy of the age for a bat mitzvah and not Jewish,

He came up with something so original,

No other black girl I knew had ever experienced it:

He took me ice fishing.

His voice drowned out my mother’s protests,

She’s black, Ma, she may as well learn suffering.

Trees bearded with ice, the smoked sky, and everywhere the sound of falling

As the truck rattled the ice rods, spinning reels, and compasses.

In the hitch: blankets, buckets, and two dozen crappie minnows in the rusted red tin.

My father, seated like a Buddha, adjusts the bucket,

Drills the holes and pitches forward.

Damn it, he laughs, it’s cold!

But how long can you sit on a bucket

Watching the white-skinned evergreens

The hoof-eyed doe skittering and the downy-sun blindness?

In the end

Ice fishing is an act of desperation.

Many years before he died, my father fell through the ice

Kicked his way back to memory,

Came home blued and withered, refusing to talk.

Now, the orange flag bolts up

The bass thrashes,

We tug and grip the line.

My father yelps, the stakes heave

Fluorescent rods stripe the sky.

We win! Meaning:

The bass got tired of all the flailing, the ridiculous jerking

And heaved itself out of the water and just gave in.

More annoyed than startled, its dark eye pulsed.

Its mouth opened and closed.

My own mouth opened and closed:

Daddy, can we save it?

Please, daddy, let’s just save it!

Why can’t we just toss it back in?

Don’t cry, my father said,

Everything dies.

Michelle Courtney Berry

CANE

Grandma Annie always brought the cane down

with one swift lash,

A cutting stroke so perfect that even white folks

had to go on and praise her.

She worked the fields from the first hint of

daylight,

Her long body stronger than the plow animal

in front of her,

The blue flowered dress hitched up beyond what

was considered appropriate.

Shoot, she’d say, it’s too hot to be formal.

Sometimes she’d turn her dark brown face up to

the sweltering sky, talking to God,

Her mouth full of praises, but scant of wishes,

dreams.

And when she was done praying, my Grandpa

James would slide up alongside her,

Pat her on the backside, a few times here-and-

there, and as the day drew down

Say real sly in her ear: Strong like an ox, I reckon.

She’d snort and brush past him, her pace

quickening, her mind anticipating

That favorite time of day—dusk: when a slight

breeze came over you

And your eyes strained to remember the last row

you were on.

Then, all at once, it was night, a time rich with

blessings:

Like having your own thoughts to think on, the

collards, meat, and fatback on the stove,

The thick crusts of cornbread dabbed greasy with

butter,

The oil lamp burnishing the room, the empty pie

plates in the sink,

The girls’ splashing, the sounds of tin and water,

the tumbling into bed,

Their sure breathing and the rocking chair

creaking.

Grandma Annie adjusts the sewing in her lap, the

needle in one hand

The stitching so straight and certain you’d swear

a machine had gone and done it.

Sometimes Grandpa would sit beside her in his

drawers, shirtless.

She’d look up from her sewing and smile, just a

little bit, and he’d take a sip of whiskey.

She’d take in the golden skin, wavy hair under his

arms,

The promise of what was between his legs.

Maybe it was the cane’s stiffness, its toughness

even in the breaking that she admired.

It sure wasn’t the cotton, its intolerable

whiteness, the insufferable bolls.

But tonight she wasn’t in the mood to remember

things that pained her.

Tonight, she was in the mood for her husband,

who put his drink down

Leaned over and uncoiled the heavy braids from her

head and pulled her up.

She spits a little snuff into the sink, takes a sip of

honey water, and heads to bed.

Naked, she licks his palm—the bible of the body,

her pulse in her throat

The sweat like sugar on her tongue.

© Michelle Courtney Berry

Published in the Race Issue, 2009,

The Race Issue

No 64 of The Oxford American

Here’s one  of my favorite poems by Mr. Leeming:

Red Autumn Bells

While holding her in my arms I start to think forward
and back, to number each chocolate, to throw rope
around laughter and her eyes.
But wondering how long it will last
is the best way to lose something
that’s all yours. So I clamber back up
into the kiss, into this blue room
where we murmur together,
the two of us
becoming one river. Ankles, elbows,
eyes and thighs: we make one river.

It was a pleasure seeing my former Cave Canem teacher, Yale professor Elizabeth Alexander at the Inauguration for President Obama on January 20. Her poem follows.

Praise Song for the Day
A Poem for Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration

by Elizabeth Alexander

Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other’s
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what’s on the other side.

I know there’s something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.

Copyright © 2009 by Elizabeth Alexander. All rights reserved. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota. A chapbook edition of Praise Song for the Day will be published on February 6, 2009.

Click here for more information on Jackson Poetry Prize recipient Elizabeth Alexander.

The Poem Itself
–The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. (From Poetry Is Not A Luxury, by Audre Lorde).

It takes a moment, maybe longer, to decide to complicate matters.
Even with the baby in the sling, garlic and collards steaming the stove,
The radio humming, the contractors banging loose the old windows,
And the too-early loss of light, I am determined to write a new poem for the event :
The occasion of appearing before the Legislature to be named our county’s newest Laureate.
This warrants something much more than an old standby.
My mother calls to tell me about her diarrhea and her latest purchase from QVC.
(I can tell she is not impressed with my new title).
But an old poem might be the more sensible choice, the censor in my head warns.

The two cats stretch before me, preening, lazy as ever.
If re-incarnation exists, then I want to come back as a house cat in a warm house
With a nice lady who feeds me gourmet, rubs my ears, and lets me curl on her lap.

Now the fax machine trills

It’s out of paper, so some sort of crazy beeping begins until I shove the paper in,
Perhaps it is a message of sorts—A Fax from God!

No, not really. Just a news release from a PR firm in D.C.
Alerting me that I can now wear an America Supports You dog tag as a visible sign of support
For our troops, a campaign launched by the Department of Defense
Just highlighted in President Bush’s speech at Camp Pendleton.

I am broken from my reverie, my attention back to war—
I don’t want to think about war—or jails, for that matter,
Nor how we are divided, not just here in the County,
But all over, the red states versus the blue states, and all that blah blah blah, whatever it all means.
I do not want to think that by wanting peace, some of our service people feel unappreciated or worse, forgotten.
I do want to remember when I was very young and thought
The Electoral College was a place you could take classes at.

I do not want to think of all the people we loved who died this year and last,
That some children go to bed beaten and hungry,
That some man is afraid to tell people his wife hits.
I do not want to know that each year, people throw brand new outfits, bed linens,
J-Crew cable knit sweaters, and one hundred fifty dollar sneakers into the trash.

I don’t want to see all the Confederate flags or feel the way the unanswered questions
Slide in my mouth like ice cubes.
I want to ask why this symbol is so important
And if I knocked at the door—you, with your Confederate flag flapping in the wind and,
Me, with my mouth full of frozen questions, would you invite me in?
Thinking I was crazy to knock, and you, would you be too startled to turn away?

Some day soon I want a wealthy person to buy me a summer home overlooking Cayuga Lake,
So I could write poems all day about how the glaciers came and left the lake behind.
I could write of our County’s 400 plus miles of rugged hills, sloping valleys, dairy farms, or the Inlet streams, gorges, gristmills, and legendary locomotives.
I could write of our early immigrants—Italian, Hungarian, Greek, Finn, and of the
Two Chinese people cited in 1900.

I could write poems about Lansing’s Turnpike Inn,
Groton’s Baker Miller Lumber Company, farms in Freeville
Tom Trencansky’s passenger trains at night photography,
Dryden’s Dairy Day and Danby’s resolution calling for the repeal of the Patriot Act.

With a home overlooking the lake, I could imagine
When the Town of Ulysses was once all of Ithaca and Trumansburg,
Or marvel that the City of Ithaca is the Northeastern Seat for The 14th Dalai Lama.
I could sit by Newfield’s covered bridge writing of first love,
Or by the Old Mill in Enfield learning the language of bees,
Hike the two Indian trails in Caroline, one near Shindigan Valley,
The other, a portion of the Iroquois Warrior’s Trail that crossed Six Mile Creek,
Or just eat soul food at the Simply Red Bistro in Trumansburg.

There is wildness to me now, something that wants and wants
The stoppered poems released into their converging rivers.
Something insides wants to sing a jazzy-blues-gospel
But ain’t it hard when Lady Day does it so much better?
And then there’s Aretha Franklin—why do people even try to ‘cover’ Aretha?
There’s no point in trying to sing her songs, just let it be people, let it be.
I want to reach beyond the ache to let loose my deep down gospel.
I want to hear poems from the one-room trailer or from within the
Fancy house in Cayuga Heights, its windows burning with light,
I want to slow down and stare, but I worry I’ll be accused of stalking,
Or worse yet, coveting.

I want to hear the hiss of wood crackling
The smell of soup boiling,
The poetry of when how your children return home, it is right then,
You realize how much you missed them.

I want to hear the sound of this County rising, the school bus wheels turning
The rustling of parents rising to home school their kids, the newborn babies wailing,
The light snow landing, the way you grind coffee beans or laugh at the people who do,
The ones obsessed with Gimme! Coffee and for you, Maxwell House will do just fine.
I want to hear the way your boots slide as you race out the door
The morning humming with news of the people in Ithaca plotting to overthrow
Something, anything!

And just all that—the poetry of the County that calls out good day,
Good day, to the overcast sky and the threat of rain
Good day to blues, good day to rain
Good-bye to overcast sky, rain, and blues
We no longer fear you.

© Michelle Courtney Berry