POETRY

My Father Speaks

By Amanda Gunn     VOLUME 48.4     2014 AUBURN WITNESS POETRY PRIZE WINNER

READ BY THE AUTHOR
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     I.

His brother Lafayette
died at the creek
with six boys
standing round him.

My mother told me
these things. Neither of us
knows anything
for certain.



     II.

In school in Connecticut
the other black children
mocked me for the way
I spoke (wannabe-white-girl-
Oreo-cookie). I could hear
North Carolina, Georgia
in their voices, the journey
from South to North that
our parents, grandparents
had taken. I lived
in a white neighborhood.
They thought I spoke
like my neighbors. Each time
I opened my mouth, how
those children must have believed
I hated them.
                     Then
they shunned me and I did.



     III.

My father is a talking man
and speaks as though
he loves the taste
of his words. He says “purdy,”
as in “purdy as a pan
of buttermilk biscuits,”
which I am
and am told regularly. When I
point this out to him,
this word of home,
he says the word “pretty”
so many times I begin
to forget who he is. I hope
I am never pretty.



     IV.

We go back home. There is
yellow brick and dust and clay
I think belong to me.
We play kickball on Christmas day
and my sneakers redden
in the mud. When I speak,
my cousins call me white girl.
They laugh when I say “y’all.”



     V.

I learned to speak from my father.



     VI.

The year he desegregated
the university, my father
wore silence wherever
he went. Some wished
it would be
his death shroud.
                            The voices
came at night on
the telephone, threatening
a brick against his head or
buckshot to his gut, his father
to be turned out
of the metal factory,
his mother’s house to be
brought to kindling.
                                 There was one
white girl who smiled
at him each day on his way
to the library. If he had dared
to speak to her, he
would have begged:
Do not be kind to me.

He could feel his starched
collar tight, hear rope
creaking against pine.



     VII.

Father, burden me. Tell me
the story of how you slept

at night. Tell me, was
the governor at the gate,

and did your father gaze
through the window into

the long evening? Tell me
about Lafayette and what

it meant when we hung
a wreath on the door

that Christmas. Tell me
about the night you left

for Chicago, never to come back
except on holiday. Burden me

with your secret voices.
Tell me about your mother

and the restaurant
that went under

when they let her go.




AMANDA GUNN is the recipient of the 2014 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize Honoring Jake Adam York. She lives and teaches in Baltimore, Maryland, where she is an MFA candidate and Owens Scholars Fellow in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Redivider, Southern Humanities Review, Thrush, New South, Weave Magazine, and Winter Tangerine Review.

VOLUME 48.4

MORE FROM THIS WRITER

This poem is one of Amanda Gunn's three winning poems from our 2014 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize Honoring Jake Adam York. Learn more about the contest here.