The Low Country Magazine

   
It’s a rousing dream that mirrors
the schoolhouse glory of these days

alongside you in the Low Country:
The sweep of the Gullah world

magically looms, under my lids,
as a bustling magazine:

not earnest Ebony, gossipy Jet,
or Ladies’ Home Journal,

but like the lavish, brimming Bon Marché—
the French meaning of the word:

on the first floor,
a swift-as-a-robin runagate

trailing a fugitive-guiding star;
a stirring spectacle

of unfailing harvest women
fanning rice in round,

winnowing baskets;
a coffle of chanting men

active in the sweat
of malarial Junes & Julys,

as summering rice kings
time & again consign them

to bull-headed sun,
unceasing swamp-labor

& unremitting malady—
On the second floor, a steely,

grey-eyed Gullah slave who endured
Job-&-Jonah-harsh snares

to savor a life, scot-free
of iron-hearted masters,

blessing her uphill descendants,
still hardy, long-despised, still

winsome as luxuriant willows,
still abraded & believing in

the unkillable dream
of colorblind justice & respect—

On the last vaulted floor,
the ease & freedom

of nowadays, spread
like a vast fisherman’s net

full of lost things & surprises,
like the reed-shifting ivory

of lithe herons lifting
from the marshland’s darkening hem . . .

To read more of Cyrus Cassells’s poetry, go to www.depoetry.com/poets/201601/04_cyrus_cassells.html.