Celtic Outlier, Lexington, VA
Celtic Outlier, Lexington, VA
By Sarah Emmett
To Moor – to tie up, to steady, boat
The day of unmooring
Untying
Oh, I try not to sneer: “So you didn’t grow up here?”
The reply “Overseas, yes.”
So you over see what is happening
How we fall apart
“Learn from it” you say
But yet it is immortalized
Huge statues
On even bigger columns
As big as the boxcars that took my people away
Overseeing people going about their business
Being overshadowed
A cause long since lost
A Barbaric civilization
Written in dusty tomes
Tucked away in musty libraries
Upended crosses on motorcycle men
Banalities “The South Will Rise Again”
I cried for days
Great-Great Grandmother’s will
Faded Presbyterian eyes
“Do not sell the boy from the mother until he is 10, then he will choose a trade”
Worried more for her eternal soul than the lives in her stead
I seek for her grave in town
Wanting to rip the marble from the parched earth
Seething over my legacy of enslavement and death
Here are my comments on the creative process that you requested. As a poet, The moment really chose me; I was in Lexington, VA, specifically to write poetry. I’d been writing a lot about COVID, the political, economic, and social ramifications of which took up a lot of my time.
The hardest sentence to write was the sentence about the actual talking with the woman in the store, and how I had to write about the time it happened as well as to bring up the painful memory.
In the first draft, I had a hard time separating myself from the content, I felt it was overly soul-bearing. I kept the part about crying because I did, and it seemed to fit. I also kept the anger, and I never have found her grave. I wanted the poem to feel unsettled. I am still unsettled.
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