A Trip She Took: My Mother's Southern Ghazals, excerpts
During March-May 1943, my mother, Florence Gerald, toured
several southern states as a union organizer.
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I.
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It will come back,
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come down the street on one leg & a wooden peg.
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Nearing Jacksonville the soil is drier,
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grassy fields with a
slight
roll.
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The fields already plowed, dead brown leaves
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thick and shining in the sun.
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A white woman will wait on a Negro man in a dept. store.
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I bleed occasionally.
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Annie's tired.
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The evening sun in our eyes as we walk back.
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I love you. You are the true friend of my heart.
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And through it all feeling as goofy as he.
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Neat. Clean. Dialectical.
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But the flux is a real flu--is it psychic or physical?
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Pull your shoulder blades together
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& await the return of picket lines.
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III.
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He writes down notes that bear upon the case.
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The trunkful of documents.
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The terraced garden--the tall pine woods beyond;
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he seemed brilliant and "right" to his balanced wife.
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Porkface cusses the waiter,
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grabs bread from Greyhair's plate.
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On a ramshackle porch in Georgia, a gaunt woman in a red robe
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combing out her beautiful long hair.
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Can't, can't, can't, can't.
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Like hammerblows. Each incapacity equally important.
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Miss Vaughn loves humanity:
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When they passed away I decided to move to the hotel.
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Very few human beings are handsome, one finds this out
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on trams and buses.
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I feel
all
dust.
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And from the moment I hit town--dear God--the same blue funk.
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V.
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She moved easily, red skirt, pink blouse, shining white earrings.
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He gave her a dollar.
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In the gargoyle plaster hotels
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30,000 soldier boys all far from home.
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I have a set made every six months.
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See the change in the human face.
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Nature abhors a vacuum:
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I was empty space in a cohesive mass.
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Woke up each morning,
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chest stuck full of hard fragments.
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It's the end I'm unsure about. Watching pelicans
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skim Miami Bay--the intense blue water--their heavy grace.
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A lake, framed by great pines;
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Spanish moss; the song of birds; sun.
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Something happens but
you
don't do it.
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The final resistance is Mother Earth.