Always at the Ohio

My poem a day challenge is finished and what a ride it was. A lot of fun at times and rather grueling at others. While I will not be writing a poem a day it is still my goal to write at least one a week. So keep checking up, because I'll continue updating this.

Always at the Ohio
November 7, 2009

It seems every time I cross this deep, grey water I ponder
how many black bodies lay on the floor of the Ohio River,
children in their fathers’ arms or still curled
in their mothers’ bellies, death
at their heals and freedom only a river away.

And they jumped for their dignity, their sanity,
because it turns out they were human
after all, and they knew death was more life than captivity,
here where the battle between North and South
began long before 1861. And I bet Ohio
never looked so good as it did then from the shores
of frozen Kentucky in the dead of winter
and death never looked so daring
in the chilled River Jordan where a perilous baptism
arbitrarily doled out freedom or a dark watery grave.

They’re just bones, now, some washed with the current
to the Mighty Mississippi along the banks of the prisons
they died to never see again, while others lay buried,
deep now, in the sediment of this River Jordan,
their bare bones, their fingers eternally reaching for salvation
toward the sands of Cincinnati

where I stand, 150 years later, my white
feet along the shore, looking out over a nameless cemetery
of lost generations whose lives were in chains
and whose freedom came in death but whose memory
lives forever in the watery territory
that still divides the North and the South to this day.