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georgia on my mind
by Cassandra Leighthey sit on their
white porches
outside their
white houses
and listen to the night sounds
rocking back and forth
back and back in time
to the Antebellum evenings when
the sweet thick air would press round
those days of peaches and honeysuckle
hanging paintings of the
white magnolia flower
the white cherry blossom
the dogwood, white
shades quaint avenues
the picture of decorous leisure
white petals float downstream
past the white picket fences where
girls in white dresses dance
through falling steamy summer evening
white clouds above red clay
on the porches, white pipe smoke
white faces and lace parasols above
black shoulders and red blood
and years later, white children attend
white schools
segregated by white parents
(white law)
--white confederacy to white supremacy
in the sultry dusk
husband and wife walk hand in hand
through gathering gloom in
white suburbia
passing silently the lighted windows
stiff-backed and picturesque
each smiling on the outside but
white-knuckled
trying for all the world to
break the other's fingers 03/20/2007 Author's Note: musings of a boston-born girl raised in atlanta.
Posted on 03/20/2007
Copyright © 2024 Cassandra Leigh
| Member Comments on this Poem |
| Posted by Eli Skipp on 06/14/07 at 03:53 AM This is one of the most outstanding poems I have read on this site. It is filled with breathtaking imagery. Lovely lovely. |
| Posted by Lulu Alder on 08/10/07 at 07:35 PM I enjoyed this because I had the same connection with Georgia but only after I left Atlanta.
The white you write becomes personified very well into its own character. And when I reflect on this poem the thought about white being the absence of color keeps striking me. |
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