02-22-2015, 09:32 AM
The Gateway (revision)
Four letters remain on the wooden sign.
The spirits who dwell there
speak silently to the passing world,
meandering among the crosses
like old lost rivers and braided streams,
momentarily eddying, as if remembering
each others’ eyes
or arms that bore deep self inflicted scratches,
some
the result of picking okra in the garden.
…ylum.
An occasional visitor bows his head
and lifts a weathered tabloid from the grass
where his grandmother once knelt.
Scanning the headline
he shakes his head and tosses the faded paper
into a nearby trash can
leaving the spirits to make sense of it all.
From his car
the white crosses
warrant an oblique glance as the road
bends gently to the left
on an early summer afternoon of ripening dreams.
The Gateway
Near the end of the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike,
about a mile from the final tollbooth,
where the toll is twenty cents instead of twenty-five,
lies a small hill
snow capped with crosses
outside the Central State Lunatic Asylum for Colored Insane.
The spirits who dwell there
speak silently to the passing world,
meandering among the crosses
like old lost rivers and braided streams,
momentarily eddying, as if remembering
each others’ eyes
or arms that bore deep self inflicted scratches,
some
the result of picking okra in the garden.
An occasional visitor bows a head
and lifts a tabloid from the grass
where it has been abandoned to the weather.
Scanning the headline
He shakes his head and tosses the faded paper
into a nearby trash can
leaving the spirits to make sense of it all.
From his car
the white crosses
warrant an oblique glance as the road
bends gently to the left
on an early summer afternoon of ripening dreams.
Four letters remain on the wooden sign.
The spirits who dwell there
speak silently to the passing world,
meandering among the crosses
like old lost rivers and braided streams,
momentarily eddying, as if remembering
each others’ eyes
or arms that bore deep self inflicted scratches,
some
the result of picking okra in the garden.
…ylum.
An occasional visitor bows his head
and lifts a weathered tabloid from the grass
where his grandmother once knelt.
Scanning the headline
he shakes his head and tosses the faded paper
into a nearby trash can
leaving the spirits to make sense of it all.
From his car
the white crosses
warrant an oblique glance as the road
bends gently to the left
on an early summer afternoon of ripening dreams.
The Gateway
Near the end of the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike,
about a mile from the final tollbooth,
where the toll is twenty cents instead of twenty-five,
lies a small hill
snow capped with crosses
outside the Central State Lunatic Asylum for Colored Insane.
The spirits who dwell there
speak silently to the passing world,
meandering among the crosses
like old lost rivers and braided streams,
momentarily eddying, as if remembering
each others’ eyes
or arms that bore deep self inflicted scratches,
some
the result of picking okra in the garden.
An occasional visitor bows a head
and lifts a tabloid from the grass
where it has been abandoned to the weather.
Scanning the headline
He shakes his head and tosses the faded paper
into a nearby trash can
leaving the spirits to make sense of it all.
From his car
the white crosses
warrant an oblique glance as the road
bends gently to the left
on an early summer afternoon of ripening dreams.