Michael H. Levin
Museum of African American History
(Basement exhibits, 2016)
This is the lumbar region
of the world—a knotted spine
whose segments radiate pain.
The Middle Passage still casts
shadows here: night sweats, damp fears
still cramped by unseen chains.
How live as property—each
orifice inspected twice a day.
Peremptory gestures that mean
strip, lie mute; mean choked-back screams.
A prohibition unto death
on contact between eyes.
How live as inventory—
lists of half-names tallied
in estates or shuffled out
of pigeonholes and slapped on
barrelheads hint what’s denied.
A stubborn slow migration
north to alien ground, ticked out
in scrapbooked ticket stubs, hints
otherwise. Somehow by bright
church hats or bluesy gospel
tunes, through gnarled dead-ended
passages they made a way
in time laid paths where there were
none; left Egypt’s black despair
behind. Yet hauled stone and hewed
wood still caw. O country, you
know well first sin. Our spiny
serpent wakes, then rises ring-
side from bunched rows of cotton
bolls again. No cure for snakes—
not goshawks, eagle-strikes or prayer—
can last: we’re bound winged angel
to its demon in a whole. Though
dignity acknowledged might
someday repair this one
sciatica of soul.
Michael H. Levin is the author of the poetry collections Man Overboard (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Watered Colors (Poetica Publishing, 2014). His work has appeared in Gargoyle Magazine, Adirondack Review, and Crosswinds, among other journals and anthologies. Levin works as an environmental lawyer and solar energy developer, and lives in Washington DC. See michaellevinpoetry.com.
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