No Mardi Gras Without Soul

                  —for Tonya Maria                               

I am a rag doll in the jaws

of a mad dog on New Year’s Eve

Mayor Nagin wants to remember

the dead when he betrays the living

He better not walk the streets

of Houston when the sun goes down

At Palm Court in the French Quarter

jazzmen open their horn cases

for 90-dollar suppers—haute cuisine,

all-night bars, steamboats & courtyards

the lowering of a giant gumbo pot

Down the road on the corner

at Claiborne Avenue a Red Cross

truck hands out 200 meals a day

New Year’s in the Big Easy

is a a bearded cowboy

in an empty beer cup

holding a second-line umbrella

marching with The Pussyfooters

 in colorful pink wigs

kicking high in frilly boots

scores of onlookers

in shades of glee and inebriation

Oil and gas companies

& merchant marines strolls hand in

hand down Bourbon Street, as if

Hurricane Katrina never came by

looking at their faces.

Is this a holiday

for non-residential squatters

of no-bids to make it all better,

culture in front seat, politics in back?

Can we have a Mardi Gras with

white men in black face

Latinos dressed as Mardi Gras Indians?

Tourists cannot tell culture

without internet cakes

& Chinese beads

It’s dangerous building

condominiums overlooking

weeping willows

a well-crafted illusion of turning

sorrow into joy, death into life.

In your madness: Show me

Fly Boy, let them come

Let them be on the battlefield

on Mardi Gras morn, you

got to sew to enjoy the holiday

There's no Mardi Gras

without old black men tacking

quilt pieces on floats, without

black seamstresses

without young women, making

hotel beds, washing restaurant

trash cans, caramel players

of jazz coronets, without invisible

sanitation workers cleaning

up the drunken mess

No Mardi Gras without Big Chief

Monk Boudreaux & his Queen,

The Uptown Rulers

The Wild Magnolias & The Dirty Dozen

Sign the petition, No. We will not

celebrate homelessness & misery

There’s no spirit without soul

Responses

Rev Addo: A wonderful and insightful piece, My Friend... 

Kam: Great! I think you've got something going here with these poems.

Herbert: Rudy, I like the poem. 

Miriam: Another wonderful poem.  A segment on the news this morning depicted the students returning to Loyola & Dillard.  The Dillard students are being housed in one of the hotels, where classes will also be held.  The Loyola students, as a part of their orientation, were taken on a tour of the devastation in the 9th Ward, etc.

Mary Louise: The New York City transit workers showed them, to their dismay, that they can't run this giant metropolis without us....but too many of them still don't want to get the message. . .

So if they rebuild New Orleans and think they can leave us out, well to paraphrase the old saying, "they'll have a real hard 'nother thought coming!" Did you every read "The Confederacy of Dunces" ?

Van: I have been reading “No Mardi Gras Without Soul” – I really like it.

posted 6 January 2006