After Katrina

—for Tony’s cousin,
who“ made it” out safely

Frustration as old as New Orleans,
where race was the unspoken issue, keeps
those who could not leave, after Katrina.

Shame grows
among the masses,
huddled in the mud and the urine,
the stench of death in torrid attics,
impatience and hunger, amid
the beatings and the suicides, (to say nothing of
the drownings, explosions, and fires). Too much water:
Humiliation floats in a woman’s hurried pee—

on the sidewalk, where she’s hidden only by a dying plant,
and a gentleman, whom she thinks to thank,
diverts his tired eyes, in the begging for
a bottle of water for one’s dying father, who is ninety,
only to be denied, lacking his physical presence,
and in the floods that glisten in the sun while being
transformed into sewer-water.
The poor left their everything at the levee,

that is, if they could leave, they left everything—
in the place where their ancestors were beaten,
after being “sold south,” then freed but given
nothing but Jim Crow. And now there’s nothing
but heat and shit here by the river’s mouth.
Somehow the hell goes on and on. (Hell
being three babies, dying in the Superdome.)

Did folks not deserve better than
the armed police, who waved guns and
herded them like slaves or black pigs? A bus
overturned on its tardy way to the Promised Land:
Redemption being, once again, denied. But somehow—
the folks who make it will somehow “make a life”:
find purgatory where there used to be hell.
But in the Big Easy (after many prayers),
they knew that life was good,
remember?

first published in Washing the Color of Water Golden: A Hurricane Katrina Anthology, The Sun Rising Poetry Press (March 2006)

See Clare L. Martin’s Katrina poem