Gary,

Watch out for the typos in the preamble and post-script: knowN and OLDer
and TRIAL. However I liked having those details before and after by way of
context. They framed the poem up for me nicely, as an international reader.
Or perhaps I'm being too kind to myself and should refer to myself as an
ignorant reader.

Not sure why the ghosts of the confederate dead should be in the river mud
(tho' you may know more than me). I had this idea of ghosts being free to
roam above ground, in the air or something. Physical remains of human
existence would be among the detritus for sure, but ghosts too? Might need
to slip in another "place" for the ghosts. "Stinky" I wasn't sure about,
hummed and hawed, but in the end liked it better than any alternative I
could think of. My son always refers to things as "stinky" and I suppose it
has an impact not carried by "stinking". Generally no probs with the absence
of punctuation. If I read it quickly enough I can pick up the sense of the
poem, with the exception of the last 5 lines of S3, (With to water) where I
became disorientated and couldn't work out what was going on. Suggest you
have a look at that part again.

I like this poem and don't like it at the same time. All those bad white
people being nasty to the black people.... It's a historical fact, and a
stain on my collective Western conscience, but maybe it's too easy a hit for
a poem. Not that I think poets should be under pressure to innovate all the
time. If I had a binary choice of people writing Shakespearean sonnets for
all eternity or nothing else, I would chose the former willingly. Perhaps in
a poem like this I would be looking for something more fundamental about
humanity, that I could take from the poem and apply to my own experience. I
end up thinking that it's a great account of a violent tradegy, (certainly
stands up and takes couple of knocks as a vivid description), but why am I
being told the story? Could be that I've missed something as usual, but
what?

Finally, all those bridges and rivers work well for me in the poem. I don't
know them but they are used in such a way that they add impact to the poem.
I can't say why.

Colin


----- Original Message -----
From: "Gary Blankenship" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, August 27, 2003 3:21 PM


The Ghost of Emmet Till Visits Mississippi

I've know rivers ancient as the world and old than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
      --Langston Hughes

There's no poetry in this river's mud,
there's no music.
There's only old turtles grown fat from
the corpses of sassy Negro boys,
oak leaves,
spanish moss,
catfish,
garbage dumped for generations
from sharecropper shacks,
and the ghosts of confederate dead.
I hear them
at every time of night and day,
they disturb my rest,
restless as it is.

There is music in Chicago
along the stinky river,
the beat of brothers
rap the beat of the Torrance Ave bridge.
There is music in a mother's mourning
as she outlives her foolish son,
in a city's tears.

There is no justice along the Tallahatchie,
gravewater for others of my clan,
deadheads their only marker.
With the turtles,
they wait in that river
for Roy Bryant
and "Big" Milam to join them,
though they wait in vain for white men
are not buried in the river's red mud.
With river cats,
they wait for Mose Wright
and sing when he grows old,
escape from the river
the only music celebrated this Mississippi water.

A stupid boy,
stupid to smart off to that white woman,
I leave my song of regret
in a Chicago grave,
pulled by the violence and anger
of dull men to this river
to float in silence,
the music of the river dead.

(Emmett Till, a 14 year old from Chicago, was murdered in Money, MI, August,
1955.  His murderers, Bryant and Milam, were acquitted and in the months
ahead even bragged "..the Tallahatchie River won't hold all the niggers
that'll
be thrown in it."  Mose Wright, Emmett's uncle, testified at their trail,
the bravest thing a Delta Negro could do.)


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