First Morning Poem
for Nancy Morejon
DC, Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2008, Adams House Suite
In a room facing chimneys
over the place Nancy Morejón rests
between sleeps lining free lines
she whispers to hearing DC:
Obsidiana, Vilma en Junio,
Un Gato Pequeño A Mi Puerta.
Morning is birdsong
in an old Spanish town.
Though the chief
in his acquired misery
echoes Kenya until he breathes
life into malady, or at least compels
us so to believe, she sleeps with
Africa, Canton, and other points slavery
turn Cuban in her bone breath
bringing love, embrace, freedom from
whatever holds the rest of us in weight.
The lifting is simple, yet
without it how sad we all be.
Embargo=fear
Yet here she is!
Sugaring our boughs before we break.
Copyright © 2015 by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke. Reprinted from Split This Rock’s The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database.
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke was born in Amarillo, Texas, on August 4, 1958, and grew up in North Carolina, Canada, and on the Great Plains. In her initial days of high school, Hedge Coke dropped out and went to work sharecropping tobacco, working fields and waters to support herself. She had already been working in factories, fields, and food service on a North Carolina child work permit since early youth. She finished her GED at sixteen years old and went on to study photography, traditional arts, and writing in community education classes at North Carolina State University.