“Reading Dante: Alabama, 1950s”

A thank you poem for all of you who've shared,
commented on, or read these poems!

I read poetry before I knew what to say to myself,
fumbling with ornate red-velvet translations, Dante
between brown pasteboard covers, heading straight
down the spiral ramp to hell, the poet leading me
to what was underneath, nether world, nether parts
no one talked about, but I didn’t expect that icy heart,
that cold despair was the biggest sin, like marble
slabs crushing the water at river’s bend, no way out.
I read on until everyone I knew was frozen, flayed,
or fricasseed, I never got to the part where the poet
sees hope, the girl my age veiled in white, beckoning,
me, I longed for her unknown sharp-edged speech,
for an axe made of words, to lift, to smash, to smash
through. It was my doomed father I followed through
the winter woods, he showed me the rill of water
running along the base of the hill, through the massed
dead leaves, I waded barefoot there in the winter,
in a place where nothing is ever frozen all the way
through.

That axe was originally Franz Kafka's. In a 1904 letter to a friend,
Kafka said: "A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."

I found those words, finally, and Beatrice became the heroine
of my book, "Walking Back Up Depot Street"--

http://www.mbpratt.org/walk.html

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

“At the Bessemer Flea Market”

Poetry, global capital, and the Deep South—

The “New World” symphony a long time ago
in the hot quonset hut, my music home work,
the oboe query, the bassoon spooning out hope
to the horizon. Yes, I wanted more than smallness,
I got into that music and rode it, rode it turned
into poetry, it turned into a plow and turned over
everything, it furrowed right through me until I
came out here, not someone whose family owns,
not someone who can say this land is mine,
not Seamus deep in a peat bog of language,
not Nazim, the other prisoners shouting words,
just me and the Saturday afternoon multinational
working class looking for one-dollar bargains
in Bessemer, Alabama, where the big steel mills
closed a long time ago, Mexicanos sorting oiled
from rusted tools, a slender woman (Hmong? Viet
Namese?) selling sheets, an African American man
meeting an old friend’s baby: I didn’t know who
I was looking at until I saw the eyes, someone
with T-shirts spelling Black History, looking back,
the march of time up to the walking sticks, Amani
carves eyes into the handle the better to see the way
forward, he goes into the thickets near his city home
to get his sapling wood, pecan, hickory, red oak,
white oak, more than 40 percent Black men un-
employed, he used to be a carpenter, now he
makes jewelry, sculpture, music, he tells me
bring the stick back if it needs something, he
leaves things unfinished to see what happens
next, pointing to the copper wires, takes pliers
and crimps them into spirals, what could be
an ear. If I have ears to hear, if I put my ear
to the ground, if I listen to the footsteps mark,
the people walking all around me in Bessemer.

For more on the “globalization” of Alabama,
see my article “From Alabama to Colombia:
Coal Company Faces War Crimes Charge”

http://www.workers.org/2007/us/drummond-0809/index.html

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

“At the Scrub Board”

This poem goes to the laundrymat at home
in Alabama—yes, I know it’s laundromat!
But that’s now how we pronounce it there--

The clouds woke up early this morning, talking
to each other, first a patter, then a long cackling
boom, they washed us and swished us, everything
was out of focus, 11 a.m. Sunday morning,
I might as well go to the laundrymat, everyone
would be in church. But when I arrived, every
machine was spinning, all the other odd-not-even
ones had the same idea: there were blue dragons
guarding the door of a grey SUV; a harried single
white woman slamming the dryer doors like gears
between shifts; three Mexicanos who’d ironed
their denim shirts; a family, three-year-old girl,
young Asian woman, older white man, crimped
and trembling; a very young skinny white guy,
a tattoo shadow hiding in the nape of his thin neck.
He stands outside smoking a cigarette, furiously,
he’s talking to one of the Latinos, their hands
squared and angled, pointing, some information
exchanged, with me too, as I watch and guess,
not much like the Sunday school cut-felt stories
I saw pressed onto the flannel easel, the camel,
the rich man, the eye of the needle, the teacher
a banker who bribed us to come and listen,
that thrilling ride after church in his personal plane
over my house, Mama waving under, small, smaller,
up over the grey-green trees, the hump-backed
little hills, the river threading between, the town,
the county spread out and waiting to be folded up
and put in his pocket, he said he’d keep it safe.
I see the eye of the future looking back my way,
the rain pours down, we keep putting quarters
into the thunder-rolling machines that don’t
belong to us, tomorrow’s Monday, and how we
get there, me and my neighbors who do
our own washing, that’s for us to figure out.


Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

“At U.S. 82 and Alabama 25 & 219”

This was the National Day to Defend Education—hundreds of strong actions
across the U.S. I drove from my home town to Tuscaloosa,
where Students in Solidarity with the Crimson Ride Shuttle Drivers
& the local SDS chapter rallied to support workers fighting for
a union, a living wage and respect at my alma mater, the U of Alabama.
More on that later--for now, here's a poem in honor of the day.

This is a place people usually pass through, twix
n’ tween, intersection, no conjunction, just a way
to somewhere else. Not the crows this morning,
stunt diving tricks between the power lines. Not me,
I was raised here, I come back all the, all the time.
But the Walmart rigs roll through, the log trucks
with pine trunks pale as skinned knees, how mine
hurt on the gravel at recess, the mercurochrome
stung, like memories coming, going, then gone,
then suddenly standing by me as I pick up shed tree
limbs in the yard and whirl them into the woods,
by me, in me, her arm arches and hand extends,
the impatient vigor, the vim, the stubbornness.
Once I brought a friend to visit, and disappointed,
she said: It’s so small, I thought it was bigger,
much bigger, the way you talked about it. She’d
grown up in a city, she had this notion big things
only come from big places. Anyone who thinks that
could stop, and just look at a word, or at a hand.

For my article on the Crimson Ride drivers’ struggle, see:
http://www.workers.org/2010/us/alabama_bus_drivers_0318/index.html


Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

"Unrest"

And here's a poem from my trip home
to Alabama a year ago--

The river is spring-flooding the island, the water
makes a scalloped glubbing sound as it swims
past the drowning trees and thickets. A fishing
lure caught in the branches winks in the setting sun.
I’m glad I can still wink back. It’s so quiet except
for the jay, the wren, the gnat catcher, the unknown
warbler bird racket, I can hear my skull creak,
my knees crack getting down the mud bank
to the ford where the ferry once crossed over
carrying the settlers, the buyers and sellers of land,
the soldiers, the people in chains stolen to work.
There was the ferry here until there was a bridge,
and upstream a railroad trestle, the train screaming
as it moved mountains of coal dug up by miners
from Italy, Wales, Poland, Jews, Africans, convicts,
Bound to the crossroads of vertical and horizontal
necessity, did they say as I do every time the plane
lands me home in Alabama, whose country am I in?
In the airport CNN announced a massacre back
where I’d just come from. A white man said: A
foreigner. A white woman said, contradicting: He
just got laid off from IBM. Six hundred thousand
jobs lost in one month. The reporter said: What if all
thirty-seven million of them got together? I think
he meant the working class, as he euphemistically
warned of unrest. Yes, my restless bones climb
back up the gullied bank, through the old road, past
layers of stone, sediment, moss, I see in the loam
there is a little city of may-apple plants, spreading
green umbrellas to shelter their twinned flowers.
Overhead in the blue sky the clouds have multiplied
and gone to seed, drifting north on filament wisps.
I walk past the sign marking history, “Pratt’s Ferry,”
and back across the crumbling concrete bridge,
the setting sun shows me my shadow stretched far
back across the trembling water. In France the workers
have taken their bosses hostage, held some owners
in the factory office, stopped the chaffeured cars and
pressed their faces up against the glass, the silhouettes
look in, voilá, the shadows reverse the image of what-is.


Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

“Smelling Skunk”

Here’s how I know I live up North: it’s snowing,
I go out for my walk, the zest of ice stings my face,
the whole neighborhood smells like skunk. No,
I’m not putting here down, especially not the skunk,
poor fellow wanders the night streets to burrow
into shelter. But at home his black-and-white coat
(striped like that guy’s walking past), at home
that coat would get him all through winter outdoors.
Look: poverty is the same there as here, and not.
The trailer park Daniel writes about, the swampdirt
shit no sump the children run through and laugh,
the landlord takes the money and does nothing,
thin metal walls, like an oven baking in summer
indoors. Here the walls are brick thick plaster,
inside now people lean into the gas oven’s mouth,
heat reddens their faces like the sun’s breath.

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010