Monuments

Today the moon sees fit to come between a parched earth and sun, hurrying the premature darkness. A rooster in the yard cuts off its crowing, fooled into momentary sleep. And soon the Perseid showers, broken bits of the ancient universe, will pass through the skin of our atmosphere. Time and space are alive over our city. Final eclipse of the sun, last of this millennium, our city’s brightness broken off. We have known other dark hours: Here, coffin that slowly passes, I give you my sprig of lilac— Lincoln’s death, winding procession toward sleep. We have known slave coffles and holding pens in yards not half a mile from our Capitol, wooden palings sunk in earth to guarantee none would escape. In this freest city. Oh if earth could talk. Earth does talk in the neatly framed yards where death thinks to lay us down to rest. Asleep, the marker stones. But not the voices, jagged bits of memory, shards of poems. Sterling Brown. Our human possessions and all they've left us. This whole city sings their songs. Say their names. In this city they are our monuments: Frederick Douglass, our Rayford Logan, Alain Locke, Franklin Frazier, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, May Miller: Not sleep but garlands left to us. Montague Cobb, William Hastie. Yards of names. And here, the place where we unearth an immigrant father of seven. He leans down—no earthly reason for his choice—to pick up his nearest child. A yard-long rack of brooms behind him, a bin of apples. Not the sleep of cold, but autumn in Washington. 1913 or a bit later. He stands awkwardly on 4 1/2 Street, S. W. Our street photographer, who’s just come by with his city chatter, ducks beneath a dark cloth. Monuments of the city behind him, he leans over his black box camera in time to capture that moment when the child will play her bit part, pushing away from her father like a boat from shore. In the sleep of winter, years later, she will become my mother. What yardstick by which to measure importance? To measure earthly agency? Each of us has monuments in the bone case of memory. Earth- bound, I take my sac of marble and carry it down lonely city streets where our generals on horseback and a tall bearded man keep watch over all their citizens.