Juneteenth: The Waist Land

Imagine the funerals in Texas

when people had to stop pretending

other people were property,

two and a half years stolen

as lagniappe for the poor masters,

powerful men menacing

work from exhausted souls carrying generations of grief,

(a raft on a river

children taken from parents,

one Mississippi

mothers sold on the block,

two Mississippi)

men’s eyes prowling,

lusting dusky bodies,

lingering on lips,

breasts, thighs,

and hips, lascivious thoughts

of what could be engendered there,

(wall still burning, Mississippi burning, Henry Clay and Agamemnon deader than ever, Cytemnestra and Antigone, too, Medea’s chariot in the sky)

palpably.

Potential purchase provides permission to touch, prod,

inspect the goods on offer

assess the flesh

It’s only rape if a

(mockingbird

Black man lays eyes

mocks

on a piece

swan)

of a white man’s

property, a proper

house slave (Desdemona)

daughter of

a good property-owning family,

auctioned at cotillion,

a debutante bill of sale (ball with proper dance cards)

draped in pearls,

(that were his eyes)

wearing white again,

out, damned spot

registered and

carried over the threshold:

mistress of the manners

pleasing her new master:

hosting,

boasting

about her powerful husband

(Delilah snips a lock)

who thinks life

is for the chosen:

of course he’s won.

A merchant chooses caskets

(Pandora boxes).

An asp hangs in laurel, suspended.

The women in Texas

(Eurydice’s lover’s flute

muting Cassandra)

await have to become

their own Paul Revere, probably

on the dirty-first

of another jeweled lie.

Persephone peels a pomegranate from Adam’s throat.

Endnotes

1. Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (raft imagery).

2. Mississippi River; counting cadence; baseball strike-count resonance.

3. W. B. Yeats, “Leda and the Swan.”

4. Troy and the aftermath of the Trojan War (The Iliad); Mississippi Burning; Henry Clay; Agamemnon (Agamemnon); Clytemnestra (Agamemnon); Antigone (Antigone); Medea (Medea).

5. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird.

6. Swan traditions, including Yeats’s Leda.

7. Shakespeare, Othello (Desdemona).

8. Cotillion and debutante traditions.

9. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land; Shakespeare, The Tempest.

10. Shakespeare, Macbeth.

11. Samson and Delilah.

12. Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice.

13. Pandora’s Box traditions.

14. Cleopatra (asp) and Daphne (laurel).

15. Orpheus, Eurydice, and Cassandra.

16. Paul Revere and warning narratives.

17. Persephone, Genesis, inheritance, speech, and transformation

Works Cited

Aeschylus. Agamemnon. Translated by Richmond Lattimore, University of Chicago Press, 1953.

The Bible. King James Version. Oxford UP, 1769.

Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land and Other Poems. Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1934.

Euripides. Medea. Translated by Diane Arnson Svarlien, Hackett Publishing Company, 2007.

Homer. The Iliad. Translated by Robert Fagles, Penguin Books, 1998.

Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1960.

Mississippi Burning. Directed by Alan Parker, performances by Gene Hackman, Willem Dafoe, and Frances McDormand, Orion Pictures, 1988.

Rilke, Rainer Maria. Sonnets to Orpheus. Translated by Stephen Mitchell, Vintage International, 1989.

Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. Edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine, Folger Shakespeare Library, Simon & Schuster, 2013.

The Merchant of Venice. Edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine, Folger Shakespeare Library, Simon & Schuster, 2010.

Othello. Edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine, Folger Shakespeare Library, Simon & Schuster, 2012.

The Tempest. Edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine, Folger Shakespeare Library, Simon & Schuster, 2015.

Sophocles. Antigone. Translated by Robert Fagles, Penguin Books, 1984.

Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Charles L. Webster and Company, 1885.

Yeats, W. B. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Macmillan, 1956.

Biblical References for Endnotes

Adam and the Fall narrative — Genesis 2–3.

Samson and Delilah — Judges 16.

Author note:

After adding to, expanding, and compressing this all day, it occurred to me that it could use some notes and a works cited page. Please let me know in the comments if textual markers are needed. I was unable to add superscripts, which is what I originally intended.