The Letters

African American Review, Winter, 2003 by Lenard D. Moore

THE LETTERS

   O Father, the letters
   that you sent to Mama
   have faded like the moon.
   Did you tell her about
   the casing that sent shrapnel
   scattering like sand?
   Did you mention the planes
   that dropped bomb after bomb
   as if they were meteorites
   and left craters
   and blew off limbs
   from fierce flanking marines?
   Did you keep writing
   for hot hurdled hours
   constantly riddled with
   machine guns? Did you tell
   about rolls calls, mail calls,
   phone calls assessing
   POWs, MIAs, and AWOLs?
   I know those old letters
   are keeping history
   on their pages like assembly lines
   create the weapons
   where words winnow and sing,
   and whet Mama's piety.

Lenard D. Moore, founder and executive director of the Carolina African American Writers' Collective, has poems recently out or forthcoming in The Midwest Quarterly, Brooklyn Review, Sauti Mpya, and American Tanka, as well as the anthology Step Into A World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature (Wiley, 2000). He teaches English and world literature in the CAPE Department at Shaw University.