Breaking through the Southern heat.

“… we never lifted our eyes from the depths

till the boss man said Lunch and the world

came back …”

To enjoy this feature as a broadside, drag the image below to your desktop. Or scroll down to read in plain text.

Work: Savannah Roots

                           ————-          in memory of Phil Levine & Royce Smith

 –

    —–Except for the scrubbed month

    ——-     ——- chilled in Mr. Dunham’s tiled fluorescence

peddling spikes, bats, gloves,

it was ditch digging, old style, with shovel and pick.

    ——-     ——- In the cut across the Esso slab

    ——- after Melvin’s jackhammer, the pair of us

 

    ——-     ——- swung and jammed like Milledgeville crazies.

One hundred plus in the blinding Georgia sun

    ——- would prove our manhood

single file behind men who’d been at it

    ——-     ——- for decades putting food on tables.

    ——- “You betta slow down,” Louis said that first day,

    ——- “you boys gonna fall out.”

Royce sneered and swung the pick and I stomped

    ——-     ——- the shovel with a football growl

and soon we were alone in the trench

    ——-     ——- all of them knew wasn’t safe anymore.

    ——- Most days we laid conduit.

 

    ——- For awhile we bailed a manhole

that filled back up every weekend. Ma Bell

    ——-     ——-  took us off that job after nearly a month

of nothing. I was five hundred miles north

    ——-     ——-  in Shakespeare when Earl died in the cave-in.

    ——- — Sam grabbed that live wire

    ——-     ——-  before Royce graduated. The rest of them

kept at it through hangovers

    ——- and divorces, Friday night scraps,

short trips to the lockup. By August we were all

    ——-     ——-  slow and steady, sweat pouring off us

    ——- like the promised waters

    ——-     ——-  of mercy as we hacked the black serpents

of the live oak roots. Earl sometimes

    ——- keened a tune not quite gospel. Some days

 

we never lifted our eyes from the depths

    ——-     ——- till the boss man said Lunch and the world

    ——- came back—shady squares hung with moss,

    ——-     ——- pines and palms and tarnished heroes

in uncool hats. “You Savannah boys now

    ——- singed black as these nigras,” one flabby foreman

hissed. Melvin’s face was stone. Royce’s

    ——-     ——-     deep tan burned. We dangled our boots

    ——- in the slit, hip to hip for chow,

    ——- sardines, pig’s feet, pimento cheese, bruised

    ——-     ——-  apples out of paper bags, pretended

we’d all stay at it to the crack of doom,

 

    ——-     ——-   that some of us wouldn’t go

off north to read a bunch of books. So much

    ——- laughter! How did Sam finish

that story about the deaf girl

    ——-     ——-   and the donkey? Oh, each of us

    ——- was clever in his own silly way, all of us

    ——-  sharing that huge swamp stink,

    ——-     ——-      and clowning like the Bard’s gravediggers

in the heavy, sodden air.

 

[“Work: Savannah Roots” was first published in Plume.]

***********************************************************************************************

Ron Smith is a former Poet Laureate of Virginia. Currently Writer-in-Residence at Saint Christopher’s School in Richmond, he is the author of the books Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery (to be issued this year in a second edition from MadHat Press) and three books from LSU Press: Moon Road, Its Ghostly Workshop, and The Humility of the Brutes. In 2018 he was a Featured Poet at the American Library in Paris, where he also read new poems in the Salon Eiffel on the Eiffel Tower. He contributed to Broad Street’s“Rivals & Players.”

Swamp roots by Bud Ellison, 2018.