Last evening, I attended Intersections, a reading series sponsored by the American Poetry Museum. The feature was Louisiana’s peer selected Poet Laureate, Brenda Marie Osbey, who hadn’t come across my poetry radar prior to yesterday. I am fortunate to have heard from her, from her home, from her ancestors. Her discussion about the traditions of her people in LA and the merging of myth and history (and of course a reading of her poems from All Saints), reached me in a necessary way. More on Brenda Marie Osbey and the American Poetry Museum.
And of course, a poem.
Bop for the Non-Beauties
after Brenda Marie Osbey
The silence rose from laundry fumes, dirt labor VA
in the lure of tuberculosis, a cackling divorce,
granddad’s murder, so perfect and finite, begin
the melding of mouths, children borne into quiet,
unnaturally mesmeric smiles, a view through blessed oil.
Come, ye disconsolate, where’er ye languish.
Which settled ancestor gifted a family
a young child, beaming oil eyes frequent
a humble altar, lacking proper salts, blood-rich powders?
Grandma watches him, directs the tired saints,
obligatory love, work in far transit of life,
a dusty blue Madonna speaks over an old flight of stairs:
Come, ye disconsolate, where’er ye languish,
Come to the mercy seat, fervently kneel.
Earth, which wretched saint struggles the stubborn
phalanges, voice? The dead converse in orange
midnight of shutters, all the earth is sunk for moments,
Come, ye disconsolate, where’er ye languish,
Come to the mercy seat, fervently kneel.
Here bring your wounded hearts, here tell your anguish.
- Melanie Henderson
