Dirt
After Gwendolyn Brooks, “The
Bean Eaters”
This red soil
built of blood sweat
and promises.
This red soil
the soil that looks
the soil of centuries
makes you remember
where you come from
where you be going.
Makes you wish
you never learned
the wrong words—
The words nigger
and kike,
the words
that mark you
as cracker
even when
your heart is not.
You whose best poet-
friend is black
man, friend who
knows your fears
and your raising.
Oh, red soil
make us instead
remember
the sacrifices—
our grandmothers’
poverty,
our grandfathers’
despair, their
native exile.
Centuries lost
to one another
yet in the light
behind the bar—
in which every
one is blue—
whoever
stands beside you
offering
is your brother,
your sister, on
sanctified soil.
sanctified soil.
Jeanetta Calhoun Mish is a poet, writer
and literary scholar; Mish has published poetry in This Land, Naugatuck
River Review, Concho River Review, LABOR: Studies in Working Class History of
the Americas, San Pedro River Review, Blast Furnace, and ProtestPoems.org, among
others. Essays and short fiction have appeared recently in Sugar
Mule, Crosstimbers, Red Dirt Chronicles, and Cybersoleil. Anthology
publications include poems in Returning the Gift and The Colour of
Resistance as well as the introductory essay for Ain't Nobody
That Can Sing Like Me: New Oklahoma Writing. As a contributing editor, Mish
regularly writes essays for Oklahoma Today; she is also a contributing
editor for Sugar Mule: A Literary Journal. She is editor of
award-winning Mongrel Empire Press. Dr. Mish is the Director of The Red Earth
Creative Writing MFA program at Oklahoma City University where she also serves
as a faculty mentor in writing pedagogy and the craft of poetry.
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