I heard that in Savannah
Georgia during the time
of the yellow fever
many victims would slip
sussurating breaths rattling like leaves
into a coma when ill.
They appeared dead and gone
and so they were carted off
to the graveyard's manicured lawn
and interred living to the hill of the dead.
Subsequently, being buried alive
became a common fear.
To allay this sensible antipathy
bodies would be laid to rest with a bell
on their grave
and that bell was connected
to their fingers with a string.
A string to ring their finger
an Ariadne gift to suss
the maze of after-seeming-death.
If the person woke from their coma
and found themselves buried alive
they could move their finger
and ring the bell
restlessly ringing their fact of non-decease.
We are bell ringers, my friends.
We are not dead yet
and the strings attached
to our fingers
thrum
with fear but also hope.
We ring our bells
from the grave
that America has become.
We have hope.
We have been interred and comatose.
But we pull the string.
We ring, we ring.
My friends,
we are not dead yet.
© 2022 Annette Marie Smith
Annette Marie Smith is an American author and poet, writing beauty in a sometime wilderness. Her books of poetry and short stories have been featured in the reading room of Shakespeare and Company bookstore, Paris, France. She's been nominated for the Pushcart prize and her work has ridden the trains and buses of Minnesota as broadsides through a Mcknight Foundation grant. Published internationally, her work has been translated into Italian, Spanish, German, Cherokee script, and included in The Irish Poetry Reading Archive at UCD Library. She is currently working on her first literary novel. Find out more at annettemariesmith.com
No comments:
Post a Comment