These poems are part of the special section, “Poems of U.S. History”, reflecting on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence selected by editors Carolivia Herron, Summer Tate, and Robert Bettmann. You can read more about the section on the Day Eight website here.
Today the Subaru time machine climbs
the hills of Petersburg, stopping
for photos of bygone barns and part-
buried tractors, their plows and blades
splayed like seeds of weeds. Over there:
the Flowerdew Hundred and the first
windmill of North America. Over there:
the Beefsteak Raid, when Confederates
paid for 2000 cattle with the lives of 14 men.
Autumn orange soybeans await the reaper.
Roots reach deeper for clean water
as the salt sea rises from underneath.
I let vultures teach me about what was
and what will be pulled from bones,
marrow of hidden history: locals burned
the Petersburg courthouse on purpose
to hide the heritage of a few wives
from New Orleans. When I sneak
across ditches for shots of ruins under
giant trees, I hear laughter in the leaves,
smell blood and gasoline coming up
like truth from luscious cotton fields.
Soon newer machines will capture
growing snow and beans rattling
in the breeze. I keep going down
roads reverting to stone and dirt.
To this day, every September
the county honors the fallen of the raid
with an auction and steak dinner.
DL Pravda tries to keep it together by driving to the country and disappearing into the woodsfarm dimension. Author of the award-winning book Normal They Napalm the Cottonfields, Pravda appeared on the Library of Congress podcast “The Poet and the Poem” with Maryland laureate Grace Cavalieri in 2023. Recent poems appear in Blue Mountain Review, Mantis, Roanoke Review and Sand Hils Literary Review. Pravda teaches at HBCU Norfolk State University.
Featured image Bubba73, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
