City of Grace

Welcome to Jackson: City of Grace and Benevolence City of Grace, you open, you part your curtains and smile like a hostess when we call your name, you tender what any traveler needs, a call to ease, a balm, a kindness, whatever storm. You take us in. City of Grace and Benevolence, you say you know what solace means, burned so often they called you Chimneyville, and now you can't forget, you've written it in bronze outside the City Hall the War made a hospital for the Yankee and for your Rebel sons, like the one who is always dying outside the Capitol. City of Fame, you hold him still, laurel on your crown, fan making a hand of wind to soothe his face and fill the eagle's wings spread above to promise, Virtute et armis, to say again just how far you'll go. City of Remembrance, you keep so well, you show us where Welty lived, the house still there, how she skated to the library, through the Capitol, the book now cast and open in her hands. Tell me now, City of Embrace, of the newsreels' children rounded from their march, flags gathered, the children trucked to the fairground cages, the ones who peer out through the chicken wire. City of Richard Wright and Ross Barnett, tell me not just where the Governor pled I love Mississippi, I love her people, her customs,