Only together holding their hands in silence can I see what a field has done
to my mother, aunts and uncles.
The land around my grandmother’s
old tin roof has changed,
I doubt she’d recognized it from above.
How many blackbirds does it take
to lift a house? I’ll bring my living,
you wake your dead.
We have nowhere to go, but we’re leaving anyhow,
by many ways. When they ask why
you want to fly, Blackbird? Say
I want to leave the south
because it killed the first man I loved
and so much more killing.
Say my son’s name,
his death was the first thing to break me in
and fly me through town.
If grief has a body it wears his Dodgers cap
and still walks to the corner store to buy lottery tickets
and Budweiser 40s.
I don’t like what I have to be here to be.
All the blackbirds with nowhere to go
keep leaving.
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