PALMETTO POEM: Rice

Rice

By Kendra Hamilton, republished with permission

You speak of the rivers of your homeplace far to the north,
How you’d leave the city in summer for the long trek
to Minnesota, then gather at the creekside in boats,
singing, to beat the grasses till they yielded their sweet black grains.

Here, beside the Edisto, rice is a bitter memory:
a darkend barn, a bright brass anklet, a chain,
a people once wild hearing the songs of a people
once free, sick for the rivers of home.

“Brass ankle” — I thought it simply meant “bright skin.”
But in this ornery riverbank town it’s a deadly insult,
you say, from days of white heat, green rivers, long past.

I’m boiling the water for a pot of rice, sifting white
translucent grains in water, an act so familiar now made strange
by the spell of your voice, the warble of your courting flute.

Hamilton

Charleston native and poet Kendra Hamilton, is assistant professor of English at Presbyterian College where she also is director of the Southern Studies Program. This poem is from her 2006 work, The Goddess of Gumbo. In August, we published an essay by Hamilton, “Blacks not only victims of racial discrimination.”