Iain Haley Pollock
Not A Prayerful Kneeling (for John Lewis)
I did not learn you had died until the day
after you died.
I bought a children’s book, on the day you died,
about Muddy Waters.
When I cashed out, behind me on a cushioned bench,
the owner’s dog slept.
A springer spaniel named Virginia, the state where
generations of my people
worked tobacco rows & buffed silver
in plantation houses.
Next morning, I read the book to my youngest
when he woke up early.
He had wet the bed and called for me
& not for his mother.
After we had breakfast, he watched a cartoon,
& I opened The Times.
I read the headline that reported your death
but could not read the article.
Later that morning, folding laundry in my room,
my youngest wandered in.
I played him a Muddy Waters album. In “Mannish Boy”
when he throats out oh, yeah
and makes it last for a dust-thick summer afternoon,
Muddy rolls desperation
into the inextinguishable will to keep on living,
a dual state of being
I have only recently begun to understand.
I read the article
after I told Naomi you had died & she asked
how, how did you die?
She meant how could you die, myth we were raised on,
Selma & Freedom Riding.
I read enough to answer her stated question & saw you
kneeling in a photo.
This was not a prayerful kneeling, though your head
was bent toward the ground.
A state trooper had his hand on your shoulder
& his billy club raised
to hit you, again, in the ribs or head. I could not
look away to finish reading.
As on many Saturdays, I jogged in Nelson Park
on the day after you died.
The day was so hot—not an Alabama broil
but hot for along the Hudson—
that only five other people where in the park.
A black woman
sat on an aluminum bench, talking on the phone
under a flaming copper beech.
Across the field, in the shade of a plane tree, two men,
a couple, lay on a blanket
& talked face to face. On the basketball court,
a white man practiced lay-ups
on the far hoop. On the near, a light-skinned boy
took foul-line jumpers,
trails of his long, fine hair undulating each time
his sneakers landed on the hard court.
I don’t know why I’m telling this to you. I think
I must be afraid.
One day, in person or metaphor, hymns meant
to calm my nerves
will hum in the warming, pre-magnolia air.
I will be walking straight
toward a wall of callused hands, gripping hardwood
and waiting down the road.
Out across the highway, the Mattress & Awning Store
will be closed for the day.
As I come closer to the wall, my song will drop
to a lowdown gravel
& dust moan, wide and flat as any delta. Turn Back
Turn Back Turn Back
will shock between my synapses, will thrum & surge
along my arteries.
Survival will seem sweet. How will I walk then
into the wall, the hands,
the hardwood? How will I give myself up
to be cracked open?
How will I watch myself split & spilled on the road,
split—like you—& spilled?
—Submitted on 01/07/2021
Iain Haley Pollock is the author of two poetry collections, Ghost, Like a Place (Alice James Books, 2018), which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award, and Spit Back a Boy (U Georgia Press, 2011), which won the Cave Canem Prize. His poems have appeared in African American Review, American Poetry Review, The Baffler, The New York Times Magazine, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of Black Poetry (TriQuarterly, 2020) and Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation (Viking, 2015). He is the chair of the English department at Rye Country Day School and a faculty member at the Solstice MFA Program of Pine Manor College.
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