The South

“You would have to be born there.”
                          –Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!

There are places where water flows without obstruction.
But the water here
was never pure.
How else justify the way men choose their own destruction?

We were flowing down Father of Waters
past Vicksburg, Natchez, gathering toward New Orleans
trajectory ample to arrive without barriers
choking the way forward and reaching the ocean

before hurricanes
took away my city and yours
that I always see as a Southerner
among the Spanish, the French, where part of me was born.

I am floating under the sun and moon.
There’s no feeling in me of fear.
Soon there will be no cities, only the ocean.
Where I would have been born, music is all I hear.

(24 June 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander