Seeing the dead lucky seven - Poem

African American Review, Summer, 2002 by Duriel E. Harris

seeing the dead
lucky seven

Field-wading like a swoll' gut heifer,
she's a mule husk in a sack dress
dragging a plough: old hair and cussy eyes.
With that skinned burlap strap
slung over her shoulder
and a trail behind, sprouting
knotty tubers and loose teeth.

Once she was a woman dreaming, boiling
rice in a borrowed pot. Starched slip and hosiery.
Leaning out of numbers-wadded windows.
Narrow city, narrow street, sad and narrow
row house-shoddy deck of narrow rooms.
A woman getting by, gnawing at the marrow
of someone else's extra.

She is the same desperate
faith, down to the last:
rolling eyes for seven,
hemming spring sod and scraps,
blind to left-heaven's bustle
of frost and craps.
Field-wading on a dead morning,
dust turns aside in her mouth.

Duriel E. Harris, a graduate of Yale and NYU, holds her doctorate from the University of Illinois. Her manuscript DRAG has been a finalist for several first-book prizes, and her writing has most recently appeared in Step Into a World, Works & Days, nocturnes, and Fence. Currently at work on Sorna, a sound recording, she has received grants from the Cave Canem Foundation and the Chicago Bar Association. Harris is the Poetry Editor for Obsidian III, a co-founder of Black Tool Collective, and the recipient of a 2002-2003 Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship.