For the Confederate Dead

by YOUNG, KEVIN

• ISBN13: 9780375711411
• ISBN10: 0375711414
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2008-09-09
• Publisher: Knopf

Summary

The award-winning "lively and excellent collection"(Los Angeles Times)about the South and its legacy, about African-American griefs and passages, from the author ofJelly RollandBlack Maria, a poet who has "set himself apart from his peers with his supple, variable, blues-inflected lines"(Publishers Weekly).

Author Biography

Kevin Young is the author of four previous collections of poetry and the editor of the Library of America’s John Berryman: Selected Poems, Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets anthologies Blues Poems and Jazz Poems, and Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers. His book Jelly Roll was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and won the Paterson Poetry Prize. The recent recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and an NEA fellowship, Young is currently the Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing and curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.


From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpts

TABERNACLE

Since they shared the same
monogram, Jim
Crow & Jesus
often found themselves

getting the other’s dress shirts
back from the wash.
This was after Jim
had made it big

& could afford such
small luxuries. He
& Jesus mostly met
Sundays in church

where Jesus came for the singing
but stayed for the sermon
& to see whether the preacher
ever got it right.

Jim, you guessed it,
came for the collection plate
& after stayed
for the hot

plates of the Ladies
Auxiliary (no apostrophe).
To one
folks prayed,

the other they obeyed.




FOR THE CONFEDERATE DEAD

I go with the team also. –Whitman

These are the last days
my television says. Tornadoes, more
rain, overcast, a chance

of sun but I do not
trust weathermen,
never have. In my fridge only

the milk makes sense–
expires. No one, much less
my parents, can tell me why

my middle name is Lowell,
and from my table
across from the Confederate

Monument to the dead (that pale
finger bone) a plaque
declares war–not Civil,

or Between
the States, but for Southern
Independence. In this café, below sea-

and eye-level a mural runs
the wall, flaking, a plantation
scene most do not see–

it’s too much
around the knees, heighth
of a child. In its fields Negroes bend

to pick the endless white.
In livery a few drive carriages
like slaves, whipping the horses, faces

blank and peeling. The old hotel
lobby this once was no longer
welcomes guests–maroon ledger,

bellboys gone but
for this. Like an inheritance
the owner found it

stripping hundred years
(at least) of paint
and plaster. More leaves each day.

In my movie there are no
horses, no heroes,
only draftees fleeing

into the pines, some few
who survive, gravely
wounded, lying

burrowed beneath the dead–
silent until the enemy
bayonets what is believed

to be the last
of the breathing. It is getting later.
We prepare

for wars no longer
there. The weather
inevitable, unusual–

more this time of year
than anyone ever seed. The earth
shudders, the air–

if I did not know
better, I would think
we were living all along

a fault. How late
it has gotten . . .
Forget the weatherman

whose maps move, blink,
but stay crossed
with lines none has seen. Race

instead against the almost
rain, digging beside the monument
(that giant anchor)

till we strike
water, sweat
fighting the sleepwalking air.



POSTSCRIPTS

The world is a widow.

Storms surround us, areas
of low

& high pressure
moving through–

should be gone tomorrow.

Rain from the sky
like planes.

We pull ourselves up
from bed
or death, wander

streets like ghosts,
lost guests.
Everyone’s a town

with the shops shutting
down, no hours
posted. Even the radio

stays closed–only news
or fools still

believing love.
Traffic that won’t move.

In the crossing, a white hearse
hanging a left.

I want to be that woman
just ahead, tapping her foot
out a car window, bare,

in time to a music
I can’t quite hear.

September 2001


From the Hardcover edition.

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Excerpted from For the Confederate Dead by Kevin Young
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.