Praise Be

When the trees were guilty, hugged up to history & locked in a cross-brace with Whitman's Louisiana live oak, you went into that mossy weather. Did you witness the shotguns at Angola riding on horseback through the tall sway of sugarcane, the glint of blue steel in the bloodred strawberry fields? Silence was backed up in the cypress, but you could hear the birds of woe singing praise where the almost broken- through sorrow rose from the deep woods & walked out into moonshine as the brave ones. You went among those who had half a voice, whose ancestors mastered quicksand by disappearing. Maybe our paths crossed ghosts hogtied in the wounded night, but it is only now I say this: Galway, thanks for going down into our fierce hush at the crossroads to look fear in the eye.