UPDATE: This poem was published in the Winter-Spring 2010 issue of Blue Collar Review. You can get your copy at partisanpress.org.
Lillian Dupree & The Ballad of Frenchman Street
It always starts with the rain and wind kicking up.
Clouds circle like vultures far out over the ocean,
higher than the sailors could see them,
if they were looking.
In a bar near Charity Hospital,
the TV shows the slowly spiraling storm,
but the sound is off and no one pays much mind
as the weatherman says “this is the one.”
In old westerns, the Indian lies prostrate,
ear to the ground, listening for the approaching hoof beats
of a warring tribe. If Donald Harrison, Jr., were to put
his ear to the ground, he would hear the low rumble of the future.
A factory in Texas made the guitar
that will be strummed when the horn should be sounded.
The strings are tight across the bridge,
like the cars and the buses and those on foot will be later.
Back on Frenchman Street, Lillian Dupree gets up from the bar
and starts for home, noticing that the breeze is strong.
She’s still in her scrubs after a long night taking readings,
listening for pulses and watching the moving lines.
This is the old part of the city.
The part the French built when it seemed like they’d be here forever.
As time and the storm proved, no one
is guaranteed this plot of land at the edge of the gulf.
First the French, then the Spanish, then the French again;
they all tried to conquer what could not be tamed;
tried to civilize the wild Caribbean soul of a city that was
never really part of this country, and yet is at the heart of it.
Perhaps it is that very separation, that very wildness,
that will make it easy for many to look away
as the bowl fills with unholy water like a rusty pot
left to decay in the tall grasses out behind the house.
Lillian Dupree is tired.
Tired of walking these same streets every night.
She wishes she could drive, or that she could afford to live
far enough away to commute.
She was born at this very hospital, born to a mother
who was born to a mother
who was born to a mother
who was born a slave.
Did you know that the last ever shipment of African slaves
from the continent came to this very city?
By that time, all the Africans you could ever want
were being mass produced in Virginia.