“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
— William Faulkner
Each fall, they appear, along
with all the excessive ornament
of comic death—the plastic
skeletons, the pumpkin-faced
displays of fear and faux horror—
while out in the yards, on lawns,
sprout Styrofoam head stones
with cotton-batting webs and
spiders from the party store—
all the fakery in the face of death.
But from the trees, the cheap and easy
prop can hang, a white sheet,
head stuffed with cotton, two
black eyes, and rope at the neck—
they move even in a gentle wind.
Children playing before and
parents within suburban homes
know not or speak not of history,
but just add more candy to the dish,
more laughter at the hanging ghosts.
All too recently, even now
the real “strange fruit” still hangs
on bloody nights, torch-lit for terror,
that echoed once through Meeropol’s
words, through Holiday’s aching tones.
Some would die and be left roadside,
some dumped in the local creek,
some buried without mark but
found later, when revolting soil
shoved the evidence to sight.
Bravado came from drink and common
hate to the bubba-faced men with
reddened eyes and necks, who growled
in cracker-barrel backrooms, then
donned sheets and rode horses, later pick-ups
to break the peaceful night with fire
and rage—the white-clothed “priests”
from the demon cult of torturing death,
who shouted fury, sweated anger, grasping
their sacramental whips and ropes.
Mornings after, families anxious,
then anguished found what remained,
and the cries and threnodies rang
across hills and valleys—one more
sacrifice to be taken from a cross.
Elsewhere, wives of the angry
washed sweat and bleached blood
from the sacrilegious night robes,
as bubba-men grunted their meals,
returned to work under reddened sun.
Fathers, mothers, today, you should know
your child’s autumn laughter curses you
before those gagging ghosts, and no
confection can sweeten the guilt, no
bleach cleanse this long legacy of blood.
* Note: The original song “Strange Fruit” was written by activist/teacher Abel Meeropol in the 1930s. The Billie Holiday performances and recordings of the song, beginning in 1939, made it famous.
8816*
[St. Louis, MO — August 2014 and After]
Merely numbers, four numbers
in sequence, signifying any
number of possible meanings
merely numbers, the address
of a common house,
on an ordinary street where
mostly unknown people
live anonymous lives, strangers
even to those footsteps away—
it was nowhere till elsewhere
the man residing fired his gun,
policing the strangers
of another street of houses
with bricks like these, and
lawns as green as these, and so
a black man died in that street,
died for being young, perhaps
proud, certainly for being
black—and he lay on pavement
in his own cooling blood
in the sun of that hot August day
and the energy that had been
his breath became a storming wind
of shock and grief and fist-raised
angry protests, that some heard
as justice, and others as rage,
till more guns were drawn
and the armored blue waves
opposed and surrounded the storm
but could not silence the wind
and back at 8816, one or two
writers or photographers paused
to see what mysteries hid behind
curtained windows and silent brick,
behind the closed and locked doors
or beneath the still-green grass
and the man packed up and moved,
so his erstwhile neighbors passed
and wondered what next, from where—
their rumors flowed daily, weekly
to flower fears even as the season
turned cold and the leaves fell—
by Halloween, the fire pits came out
and the children tricked for treats
and the parents followed brats
with beers, and stoked more fears—
“they’re coming some day, coming
with fire, and we need be ready,
alert and ready,” and more beers
brought foggy sleep to watchers,
and a couple dumped the embers,
they thought extinguished, into bins
where hours later the embers flared
and fired the house, residents barely
escaping with breath and the clothes
on their backs, and the burnt remnant
stood an epitaph through winter months—
armed and vigilant, they seek protection
from anyone appearing darkly different,
from the brown mower or the black
delivery man, the shadow of difference,
and they believe themselves protected
from those who do not look the same
but who, in the shadowed night, will
protect us from protectors, and who,
God knows, protects them from themselves
* 8816 was the house number address of former police officer Darren Wilson who shot and killed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, on August 9, 2014.
Child, Do Not Be Sad
[For the Parents Afraid of History]
Child, do not be sad, do not
feel the weight of the past, of
the history of fault and moral failure.
Do not be sad at the fact
of ancestors, long ago, who seized
dark strangers on darker nights
and transported them, wave
by wave, through oceans of hell
and high water nightmares.
Do not be sad, child, at the
record of crimes that made fortunes
we can now enjoy, because we
stole lands and lives, committing
genocides on peoples seeming so different
they were not people to us.
No, child, do not mourn for suffering
souls, chained in ship holds
and sold at auctions, do not fret
at the thought of those shackled
wrists and ankles, where red-rusting
iron left its mark with redder blood.
Child, do not be sad that even now,
we live well and others do not—the poor
are with us always, says the book,
so poverty is the necessary evil
suffered by those, you and I know,
are less deserving of our god’s grace.
No, child, do not be troubled in dreams
of young, dark girls, raped in the night
or in the broad daylight, by haughty masters.
Child, be not sad, do not listen to
the histories, told sotto voce, by those
who rarely have had a voice, a place.
Child, be glad to have your desires
met tenfold when others long fruitlessly
for the merest scraps of hope.
Child, you are the one blessed, anointed
in the white light of the white mind,
that reveals your chosen path above
and beyond the many who lost or lose,
the many humbled by the weight of chains
and lash, the many who remain in terror
of a night filled with shadow men, once horsed,
but now in pick-ups and vans, guns raised,
saluting their raging race of white pride.
Child, do not be sad, for we will keep you
warmly held in the arms of ignorance,
innocent of knowledge, free of truth.
Vincent Casaregola teaches American literature and film, creative writing and rhetorical studies at Saint Louis University. He has published poetry in a number of journals, as well as creative nonfiction, short fiction, and flash fiction. He has recently completed a book-length manuscript of poetry dealing with issues of medicine, illness, and loss (Vital Signs) for which he is seeking a publisher.
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