Catherine Sasanov
(USA)
Ode to the Lost Slave Cemeteries
(Greene County, Missouri Ozarks)
They’ve plowed the fields
where death’s
held down
beneath squat, illiterate
stone. So much
dusty, windblown blood.
The type
that rarely died in bed.
Can’t you taste
long shadows
cast from drops of it?
Screams blown
from farm to farm?
Developers want you
to know:
There is no eternal rest
where slaves, dead infants,
share a bed.
No grounds man comes
to soothe their sleep,
tuck in
the anonymous grass.
(And the wound
through which I’m looking
out at this? All lacy curtains,
pane
of glass. Domesticated
festering. All the blood
washed off my hands.)
Bulldozed,
backhoed –
Once destruction came
intimate
as a man
striding in with his fear
of ghosts, his metal
on a stick.
Now hearsay’s the map.
It leads to this: back
where the living
were once alive
to visit. Down where
the city sprawls
all over it.
____________________________________________
Catherine Sasanov is the author of the poetry collections Traditions of Bread and Violence (Four Way Books, 1996), All the Blood Tethers (Northeastern University Press, 2002), and Had Slaves (Firewheel Editions, 2010), written out of her discovery of slaveholding among her Missouri ancestors. She is also the librettist for Las Horas de Belén: A Book of Hours, commissioned by Mabou Mines. Las Horas, a Mexican-U.S. theater collaboration, explores the religious, economic, and institutional prisons women have found themselves in, from the Colonial period through the present, in Mexico City. Sasanov lives in Boston, Massachusetts. Her website is catherinesasanov.com.