"Clearcut"

A poem for going home to Alabama this week,
memories of love and resistance and the struggle
against the lumber, steel and coal companies
that own most of small Bibb County,
at the tail end of the Appalachian Mountain chain.

Between east and west, between morning
and evening, between the beginning and
the end, if I go far enough south, I come
to red clay, drought, the green rivers lying low
in their limestone beds. I come to the woman
who said, I always felt you belonged to me,
the one who is still dead. I come to the man
who handed the ladle and the water bucket
to the others, and made the man with the gun,
the white man, wait in the heat. Memory pushes
against me, pushes me over, under, the sun
on my left, the sun on my right, until shadows
I can follow finally come back across the road
as the trees grow up from the company’s clearcut.


Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

“Red-Shifting”

Starry spirals float on the TV screen, snowflake
galaxies telescoped back in time, so our memory
is now thirteen billion years old, burning, not
melting, starry campion flowers in the sun. Where
was that? By the cold green creek, petals sparkling
in sand, in limestone bluffs, detritus of diatoms,
crinoid sea-lilies, five-armed feather-stars,
calcified memory blooming deep inside the rock
the boys and I jumped off of into a swimming
hole that time needed five hundred million years
to make so the creek could flow. How I wish
I could step my bare feet into that water again.
Carrying memory like trying to pick water up
out of the creek, losing more than I get to keep.
Lonely for the dead, those I can no longer touch,
those alive but older, their young selves running
through my brain’s labyrinth, like Miz Venola
remembered me at one-day-old, my tiny fingers
scratching at my face, grasping at whose hands?
Mama’s white, Laura’s dark, stark history, centuries
to pull myself up to, into, now we call it the struggle
to know what we are born into. When they died,
their me ceased to exist, leaving me to this task,
trying to hold onto each minute of new memory
until my red neuron stars can filament finger
millions, some new connection with the past,
ignition, yes, it is just us and neurogenesis, red-
shifting forward toward multiple possible eternity.

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010