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Recently I paid a visit to the city where I was born, New Orleans, my first since Katrina. Other members of my family have expressed their feelings about the city through photography. I'm not good at taking pictures, so instead, I wrote this.
Poetry is not something that prose writers really have much business attempting unless they are Shakespeare or Edgar Allen Poe, or Thomas Hardy. Still, nothing else seemed right.
In New Orleans the old spirits still walk
Madame Lalaurie, waving her crusted whip,
And chasing a black girl,
The white-faced soldiers in blue,
Gibbering from their window,
And the sausage maker’s bloody wife
Thumping and flubbering up
From the grinder.
The girl with roses still knocks
At the door where the harlot sleeps,
And the rented ovens still bake bones
Where long grass waves and lizards skitter.
Tourists are still hurried along
In timid herds through the maze of tombs,
Told by the guide never to come alone
Even in daylight.
Take your picture quickly and return
To the city of flesh.
Cayenne and onion,
scallions and garlic
Still sing their song
In iron skillets,
Waiting for meat to send up
Its own smoky ghost to beckon in
Those who pass the open doors.
Under black metal lace
Diners still sip coffee
At tables slightly askew
On the broken sidewalks.
Bourbon and rum is still set aflame.
Music still roars on Bourbon Street.
And at night, plump students carry plastic cups
And shout and shimmy, while the stores
Spill light and masks, t-shirts and beads,
Onto dark streets shining with piss and beer.
I hope Marie Laveau still sends
Uneasy dreams to the pale and the guilty
Who toss her a coin,
Hoping for word from the darkness that covers
Those places where we won’t go when awake.
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