This place is not mine but ours, shared in unremitted resistance,
we tug reluctantly—as our parents did—against its kudzu tether
that wrings the limp neck of change and digests progress slow as supper’s grease,
But our preachers taught us to call these dirt roads home
if only to scold us into forgiving their trespasses.
A dry well’s faucet; all decency in this state pours into our streets,
all cries against temptation toll from our church bells
for thine is the kingdom and the power and the sound and the fury
Sunday services obligate the masses, which come forth as unwilling as worms from soggy ground, singing “on earth as it is in heaven” but hoping for so much more.
Oxford feeds from the milk of its mother’s copper tears,
tears yielding pristine cotton that quilts guilty fields like down
as if to cry “deliver us from evil” to some other god’s sanctuary
Each spring I bloom with magnolias, spreading seeds of loathing in this velvet ditch but it is mine, ours, and we share its red clay like keys to a club that no one ever asked to join.
We all come here the same way, like intruders in the dust,
born broken into a broken tradition and always surrendering
defeated by the sweltering heat that drowns the desires we once dared to dream
And as we lay dying, our unwashable hands clinch to regret our plea “forever and ever
amen.”
