Lifting

      Tribute for Kenilworth Slave Cemetery 

By Glenis Redmond

Many don’t know but brown hands 

did toil in the Blue Ridge 

beneath the appalachian sun. 

Chained to nothing, a cruel familiar crumbling, 

they would never own— 

only to be buried like cast offs under the same nothing. 

This poem stands. 

This poem stands for those. 

Those laid low in their living. 

Those never lifted to the height anyone deserves, human dignity high. 

Higher than hardships rising only to crash relentlessly 

pressed down like a heavy lash on sickled backs. 

This poem is for those who moaned out to empty air 

only to have nothing answer back in return. 

Those living their whole lives housed in misery’s shack 

without a drum, 

without a fluid tongue. 

So they retained the hum and the motherland’s call 

and the motherland’s response into songs. 

Those same songs 

the ones if you call out to them even today will answer. 

They will call back 

will bid us to wait on low swung chariots 

bid us to ride even when we feel motherless 

or bowled over by fatherless grief. 

But our legacy lies in hymns hummed in shackled pain, 

chain links so strong they linger on 

releasing a moan until we feel the ache of land lynched beneath our feet. 

No this poem don’t make up for what was done. 

It is not forty acres and a mule, 

but a tarried step in the right direction. 

This poem could be confused for a cotton seed dropped, 

a tobacco plant hung and cured, 

or corn plucked, shucked and stacked 

but this has been already been done. 

This poem is a new generation 

lifting bone embedded soil 

turning its thickness over and over 

into a better day, an intentional beacon 

a long time in coming marker, 

a purposeful monument 

singing with many mouths 

radiating all kinds of hues 

confessing how this place has stood 

mountainsong silent about brown hands far too long. 

In these hills let this day ring with a slave anthem 

a bell singing, a healing balm easing wounded air. 

Let this litany of words tend to all our sorrows, 

caress our unease, while lifting that which has never 

been lifted before. 

Let this poem sprout Sankofa’s wings, 

from the mythical ancestral bird looking back 

from the land where our courage was born. 

Let our tongues, hearts, minds and hands 

grant airborne blooms so they may never be buried 

or laid so low their stories are forgotten again. 

*   *   *   *   *

19 June 2006