ONLINE FEATURE

Aubade for Langston

By Rachel Eliza Griffiths     Of Rivers: A Chapbook

Vertical Divider


When the light wakes & finds again
the music of brooms in Mexico,
when daylight pulls our hands from grief,
& hearts cleaned raw with sawdust
& saltwater flood their dazzling vessels,
when the catfish in the river
raise their eyelids towards your face,
when sweetgrass bends in waves
across battlefields where sweat
& sugar marry, when we hear our people
wearing tongues fine with plain
greeting: How You Doing, Good Morning
when I pour coffee & remember
my mother's love of buttered grits,
when the trains far away in memory
begin to turn their engines toward
a deep past of knowing,
when all I want to do is burn
my masks, when I see a woman
walking down the street holding her mind
like a leather belt, when I pluck a blues note
for my lazy shadow & cast its soul from my page,
when I see God's eyes looking up at black folks
flying between moonlight & museum,
when I see a good-looking people
who are my truest poetry,
when I pick up this pencil like a flute
& blow myself away from my death,
I listen to you again beneath the mercy
of a blue morning's grammar.



RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS is a poet and photographer. She received an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Cave Canem Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Millay Colony, and others. Her writing and visual work has appeared in Callaloo, Poets & Writers, The New York Times, American Poetry Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, Indiana Review, Ecotone, Crab Orchard Review, Salt Hill Journal, and many others. She is the author of Miracle Arrhythmia and The Requited Distance. Her third collection of poetry, Mule & Pear, was selected for the 2012 Inaugural Poetry Award by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Her most recent collection is Lighting the Shadow. Griffiths teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and the Institute of American Indian Arts. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

SELECTIONS FROM OF RIVERS APPEAR IN VOLUME 49.3