The notice reads as if Ed Roach died yesterday—

the family asking everyone to celebrate the life of their 24-year-old son.

Oh, plow the red clay, yellowed leaf,

A black man in the county back in 1920, Ed was beaten, shot five times, and strangled

for attacking a white woman on the road to town. 

Dig beneath the loblolly and sweet gum,

Though he had been with his family in the tobacco since sunrise,

a mob of 200 men hanged him from the old oak at the AME church.

Ed Roach, rise with your severed noose,

In the red-dawn hours, his family buried him beneath the plow. 

That night, the oak, burst into a fiery epitaph on the road to town.

Your time smoldering in the fields is over.

The memorial service is like a shock from a live wire—

a current singeing the county, exposing the simmering rot within.

****

An earlier version of this poem first appeared in the poetry magazine Better than Starbucks in its May 2019 issue (Vol IV, No. 3).

Categories: Poetry, Selection: 2019