Black History, Fat Tuesday & Chicken Bones

I missed on posting something just for Mardi Gras. Still grieving the death of a legendary city. Her songs will come. And the Queen City will also share other songs lamenting fallen cities. Baudelaire's Swan comes to mind (deposed African queen, exiled, bedraggled, wandering the streets: je pense à vous) despite its parched environment. He understood the city without ever having been there.

Until then, this is for her ... for end days of Black History Month (that she is so much a part of) and to introduce readers to Chicken Bones

I Am New Orleans

New Orleans poet, 1900-1976, Marcus B. Christian's Whitmanesque poem catalogs and celebrates the city's complexities and the role of African-Americans in its long history.

New Orleans sunflower growing out of post-Katrina toxic muck

More NOLA images (2005-2009), photos by Eric Paul, Metairie LA

A Survivor's Poem (excerpt)

Give me a drink. I have been

bound here for three days
watching the wretched water

have its way
destroying and terrorizing

anything in its path
and here I stand thirsty

in the Aftermath
Stand . . . I stand when waves

of death surround me
when treacherous floods

attempt to swallow me
I look to the left there is water
I look to the right there is water
I look for my children there is water
I look for my home

and all I see is water
But I’m here

and I’m looking for water
not the kind I can drink

and be thirsty again
but something that will become

in me a fountain
of water springing up

By Denay Fields, posted 11 September 2005

Chicken Bones: A Journal for Literary and Artistic African-American. More poetry in Literary New Orleans: Poems, Essays, Reports, etc, from those outside or those in the Big Easy.