.
[with poems by Frank X Walker]
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Statues of Liberty
.
mamma scrubbed
rich white porcelain
and hard wood floors
on her hands and knees
hid her pretty face and body
in sack dresses
and aunt jemima scarves
from predators
who assumed
for a few extra dollars
before christmas
in dark kitchen pantries
they could unwrap her
present
.
aunt helen, her sister
took in miss emereen’s laundry
every Saturday morning
sent it back
had washed, air dried,
starched
ironed, folded
and cleaner
than any professional service
.
she waited patiently
for her good white woman
to die
and make good on her promise
to leave her
a little something
only to leave her first
.
aunt bertha, the eldest
exported her maternal skills
to suburbia
to provide surrogate attention
to children of money and privilege
and spent every other moment
preaching about
the richness of the afterlife
before the undertaker
took her
to see for herself
.
housekeepers
washer women
maids
a whole generation
of portable day care centers
traded their days for dimes
allowing other women
the freedom to shop
and sunbathe
the opportunity to school
or work
.
this curse-swallowing sorority
dodged dicks
and bosses
before postwar women
punched clocks
they birthed civil and human rights
gave the women’s movement
legs
sacrificed their then
to pave the way for a NOW
their hard-earned pennies
sent us off to college
and into the world
our success is their reward
we are their monuments
but they
are our statues of liberty
.
Frank X Walker
from Affrilachia, Old Cove Press, Lexington KY. © 2000
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She and I squat beside the mudgreen puddle and discover a universe. I can’t quit watching the inch-long worms grubbing through the muck, their muscular tubular bodies, how they poke their siphon up to the break the surface tension. Is that the head-end or the butt-end? Lily points out the cadres of dusky tadpoles, some sprouting new legs, and she suspects they’re connected to the vibrato croaks we’ll soon hear from overhanging branches at dusk. Lily’s mom, Jodi, and I play Dueling Nature Apps to see who can broadcast Cope’s Grey Treefrog first.
.
In a couple of weeks, Lily will return to Kentucky for her senior year at Berea. I don’t know her major but her field of study is the earth and all that’s in it. When she was seven (and eight, and nine . . .) and came down from West Virginia to North Carolina to spend a summer week at Camp Auntie Lin & Uncle Bill, she was the little girl picking up every bug we encountered and calling out the name of every bird that sang. This afternoon she has showed me her newest drawings: wildflowers, amphibians, a howling wolf. Her big plush firefly is already packed with her other critters for college. If your home is a cabin in the woods and your mother is a Park Service Ranger, how could you become other than a lily of the mountains?
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Now the shadows are stretching out across the Crownbeard and Yarrow and the last breeze of July has knocked off several degrees. Jodi’s birthday gathering with sisters draws to an end; Linda, Saul, and I have to head back south. Tomorrow at first light the roofers will arrive with slate-gray tin for Jodi and Lily’s new cabin, and the two women ask me for one last favor. I lug three stout logs from the woodpile and stand them on end to half ring the tadpole puddle. Jodi will flag it so the drivers don’t squash their trucks through the little persistent pool of new life. For the next two weeks, Lily will visit every day to mark the tree frogs’ and peepers’ metamorphosis. When she completes her classes in the spring and drives east again on Rte. 60, the Midland Trail, back to this little hilltop of trees and creatures, no doubt a new chorus will greet her.
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❦
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I am thankful for names that anchor their meaning into my sieve-like memory – Tetraptera; Erythrophthalmus; Frank X Walker. I noticed poems by Frank X popping up in my favorite anthologies, like Black Nature and The Ecopoetry Anthology. The universe kept inviting me to read more, to add this new species to my lexicon, and then I discovered that Frank X Walker will be the instructor at the inaugural Tremont Writer’s Workshop in the Smokies. The universe led me to his books.
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Affrilachia is deep as the Ohio River Valley and broad as the Cumberland Mountains; it is angry and also healing, somber and laugh-out-loud. Most of all, Affrilachia is unique. Frank X Walker’s voice is true and sure from page to page to page but what a voice, rural and hip, local and universal, Southern and Black. I could not put this collection down. Then twenty years later, with many other books in between, comes Last Will, Last Testament. This is an extremely focused book, the first months of his son’s birth and the last month’s of his father’s death, but within these transecting interconnected events the man tells his entire life’s story. He concludes In Another Universe with these lines: Forgiveness is our new last name, / Loving is our first. But he is not describing some distant unattainable universe; these lines are the universe of Frank X Walker’s now. From isolation, loss, and pain come revelation and joy. I have been richly blessed by these poems.
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Tetraptera means ‘four wings’ and is the species name of Carolina Silverbell. Erythrophthalmus means ‘red eye’ and is the species name for Eastern Towhee. Frank X Walker means ‘multidisciplinary artist’ and first African American poet laureate of Kentucky and he has been voted one of the most creative professors in the South. Frank X is founding editor of pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture and is Professor of English and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Harvest Time
.
Cancer came
on quiet possum feet
disguised as pneumonia,
until the steady hack and cough
just wouldn’t go away.
.
Everybody but him had forgotten
that he smoked
two packs a day for fifty years.
.
When he added up the cost,
realized he could buy that tiller
he wanted +++ in a month,
he took his last puff
and quit +++ without blinking.
.
If only he could use it
on the tension in this room
and plow up the nastiness,
mistrust, and division
rooted in the dirt
from a past he can no longer
turn under the ground.
.
Frank X Walker
from Last Will, Last Testament, Accents Publishing, Lexington KY. © 2019
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Afrofuturistic Messaging
.
When I hear him laughing
until he runs out of breath,
gulping more air and giggling again
at something unseen in the ether,
or catch him staring intently
over my shoulder
in the direction
of our Dogon masks
at something invisible
and possibly vibrating
in a spectrum of light only accessible
to the newly-arrived
or those about to depart,
I assume it is you +++ or mama
continuing one of the last and best
conversations you had on this side,
or exchanging coordinates.
.
He, barely a haiku, had just met you
and began jabbering and cooing
in couplets, like an old friend
from some other space and time.
.
You were even happier
to stare into familiar eyes,
to be comforted
about all that was ahead,
to catch up
with the old and the knew,
the breath between you
transforming into something
interdimensional,
the twinkle in your eye
starlight
from another galaxy.
.
Frank X Walker
from Last Will, Last Testament, Accents Publishing, Lexington KY. © 2019
.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Affrilachia
(for gurney & anne)
.
thoroughbred racing
and hee haw
are burdensome images
for kentucky sons
venturing beyond the mason-dixon
.
anywhere in appalachia
is about as far
as you could get
from our house
in the projects
yet
a mutual appreciation
for fresh greens
and cornbread
an almost heroic notion
of family
and porches
makes us kinfolk
somehow
but having never ridden
bareback
or sidesaddle
and being inexperienced
at cutting
hanging
or chewing tobacco
yet still feeling
complete and proud to say
that some of the bluegrass
is black
enough to know
that being ‘colored’ and all
is generally lost
somewhere between
the dukes of hazzard
and the beverly hillbillies
but if you think
makin’ ‘shine from corn
is as hard as kentucky coal
imagine being
an Affrilachian
poet
.
Frank X Walker
from Affrilachia, Old Cove Press, Lexington KY. © 2000
.
❦ ❦ ❦
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❦ ❦ ❦
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V E R S E and I M A G E 
enjoyed the poems and their full imagery and your comments about your time with Jody and Lily
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Thanks. I wish she could have come to one of our High Adventure hikes. —B
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What a beautiful newsletter and collection of poems, reminiscences and observations. Thanks for sharing Frank X Walker’s exquisite poetry. I am deeply moved. Thank you, Bill.
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Jennifer, thank you for such high praise. I am happy that these words connected us. —B
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Thanks, Bill, for introducing me to the poetry of Frank X. Walker. Wonderful poems.
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Thanks, Richard. Each of these books is an entire ecosystem. —B
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The more we read Griffin the smarter and more multidimensional we become.
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Thanks, Best Buddy. —B
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Thank you for the introduction to Frank X. Absolutely wonderful. And best wishes to Lily and her mom.
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Thanks, Kevin. Every poem in these two books is like a solid unabashed handshake. And thanks for the good wishes to a solid young woman. —B
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I introduced students to Frank X Walker a few years ago, and one young man (who performed his own poems just for me on the chapel steps) delved into Walker’s wonderful poems for a research project. Thanks for sharing these words, Bill.
Rebecca
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Rebecca, thanks for sharing that — I’ve stood on those steps and I’m conjuring the image. Thank you for stopping by. —B
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[…] Small, Renée Whitmore, Kim Hayes, and Suzanne Bell. Our teacher, mentor, guide, and brother is Frank X Walker from Lexington, Kentucky, speaker of poetry, professor at University of Kentucky, and former state […]
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