PALMETTO POEM, Miles: July 1963 

By Rene Bufo Miles, special to Charleston Currents

It looked like ribbon my husband said
that long run of river
flattened out in the summer heat,
and at first, that’s what it felt like,
the shining water reflecting the sunlight
as they rafted in the early morning.

There was the silence, the warmth of it,
that first day on the Alabama River
before the country lost its balance
and forgot rooted honor, he said,
the young rising up, refusing to fight,
but not these boys on the river.

Four boys, barely seventeen,
floated 200 miles down the Alabama,
a high school graduation jaunt
hatched in the green light of spring leaves.
Raft built from borrowed lumber,
food was stored in seed sacks, wooden crates.
The fields beyond the river new plowed.

My husband said he slept off the bourbon
in the stars’ light,
never imagined so much water
in all the flip chart maps
in his twelve years of schooling,
never imagined the river so wide,
the water so black.

These few things he told me
though he never spoke of the darker water
of rice paddies four years later.
He never mentioned
the mud, knee deep in the fields,
the soldiers blood.

The long run of the river is what I see
when I think my husband’s thoughts,
the four boys with flip chart dreams
not the steaming fields,
the battered men,
the broken country,
but the river wide as sky.

About the poet:  Rene Bufo Miles’s career as an educator spans 41 years, during which she taught at middle, high and college levels. She recently retired from 20 years of teaching at Charleston County School of the Arts where she designed and implemented the Creative Writing Program and literally made it her child. On three occasions, Scholastic Publishing named her the Gold Apple Teacher for submitting the most outstanding group of entries. She and her student, Jessica Atkinson, were featured in a New York Times article by Michael Winerip, she was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to attend the Bread Loaf School of English, and her poetry has appeared in various journals. When she is not running around like a nut she is quilting, gardening, cooking, taking Zumba classes and still writing poetry.