Home (from Court Square Fountain-
where affluent ghosts still importune
a taciturn
slave to entertain
them with a slow barbarous tune
in his auctioned baritone-
to Hank Williams’ headstone
atop a skeleton
loose in a pristine
white suit and bearing a pristine
white bible, to the black bloodstain
on Martin King’s torn
white shirt and Jim Clark’s baton,
which smashed black skulls to gelatin)
was home, at fifteen: brimstone
on Sunday morning, badminton
hot afternoons, and brimstone
again that night. Often,
as the preacher flailed the lectern,
the free grace I couldn’t sustain
past lunch led to clandestine
speculation. Skeleton
and flesh, bone and protein
hold-or is it detain?-
my soul. Was my hometown
Montgomery’s molten
sunlight or the internal nocturne
of my unformed soul? Was I torn
from time or was time torn
from me? Turn
on byzantine
turn, I entertain
possibilities still, and overturn
most. It’s routine
now to call a hometown
a steppingstone-
and a greased, uncertain,
aleatory stone
at that. Metaphors attune
our ears to steppingstone,
as well a corner-, grind-, and millstone-
all obtain
and all also cartoon
history, which like a piston,
struck hard and often
that blood-dappled town
scrubbed with the acetone
of American inattention. Atone
me no atoning. We know the tune
and as we sing it, we attain
a slow, wanton,
and puritan
grace, grace can’t contain.
(Andrew Hudgins)
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Based on Topics: Night Poems, Soul Poems, Home Poems, Morning Poems, History Poems, America PoemsBased on Keywords: baton, montgomery, affluent, cartoon, greased, unformed, clandestine, lectern, baritone, nocturne, piston