Poem: A Story of the City

Columbia, S.C., skyline.

By Ed Madden
(written for the 2015 State of the City Address by Mayor Stephen K. Benjamin, 20 Jan 2015) |

In the story, there is a city, its streets
straight as a grid, and in the east, the hills,
in the west, a river. In the story,
someone prays to a god, though we don’t
know yet if it is a prayer of praise
or a prayer for healing—so much depends
on this—his back to us, or hers, shoulders
bent. We hear the murmur of it, the urgency.

In the story a man is packing up
a box of things at a desk, a woman is sitting
in a car outside the grocery as if
she can’t bring herself to go in, not yet.
Or is the man unpacking, setting a photo
of his family on the desk, claiming it?
And is the woman writing a message to someone—
her sister maybe, a friend? In the story,
a child is reading, sunlight coming through
the window. In the story, the trees are thicker,

and green. In the story, a child is reading,
yes, and his father watches, uncertain
about something. There is a mother, maybe
an aunt, an uncle, another father. These things
change each time we open the book, start
reading the story over. Sometimes a story
about trees, sometimes about a city
of light, the city beyond the windows of a dark
pub, now lucent and glimmering. Or sometimes
a story about a ghost, his clothes threaded
with fatigue and smoke, with burning—you smell him
as he enters the room, and you wonder
about that distant city he fled, soot-shod,
looking back in falling ash at the past.

Sometimes it’s a story about someone
singing. Or someone signing a form, or speaking
before a crowd, or shouting outside a building
that looks important, if only for the flag there,
or the columns, or the well-kept lawn.
By now it’s maybe your story, and the child
is your child, or you, or maybe we’re telling
the story together, as people do, sitting
at a table in a warm room, the meal
finished, the night dark, a candle lit,
an empty cup left out for a prophet,
an empty chair, maybe, for a dead friend,
a room filled with words, filled with voices,
the living and the dead, someone telling
a story about the people we are meant to be.

Ed Madden, an associate professor of English at the University of South Carolina who directs the university’s Women’s and Gender Studies Program, is poet laureate of the City of Columbia, S.C. Republished with permission