South Flight (excerpt)
Jim Waters Makes Parable of Seed March 13, 1921what remains of blacks through these partsain’t much. soil loam. even seedsrefuse to peel melon rinds.we pressed hard. just to see us run.forgive me. b.this frankness. I know yourather talk scripture: the hijackedprice of sugar. how to set seethingbroilers for sauce. but even in eden,eve come to know what she wasn’t—sweetness of flesh. bitternessof pits taught her nosuch thing as the call of paradisebirds in exile of clasped wild.b, you’d have meplay your minister. pray somethingsprout out our stalk. tell me whathappens when your hope for mesprawls big as south,yet this kind of living make mesmaller than a few chickweed seeds? Beatrice’s Prayer to Be Reborn in the Southas an Old Cypress April 21, 1921Sometimes I pretend I’m made of a sturdier thing—cast iron, good work boots, your papa’s ploughsummer he pulled cutthrough fields on his own back.Wide waisted, an old cicada cypresscan’t be rounded by belts or gingham dress ties.A cypress tree does not fail in an ice stormor when wind spoolsthe North Canadian River overevery crop and front porch,does not tell of secrets: termite, woodear, the skirmishof broadcloth skirts, your lovinhands, or who hangs, face nearand looming like ripe casket fruit among the webworms. Even your trapper blade can’t cutthe heart or the ugliness we’ve come to know,for what it’s worth, much less our names. Jim——Beatrice Veredene Chapel
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- December 24, 2021
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Excerpted from SOUTH FLIGHT: by Jasmine Elizabeth Smith.
Published by University of Georgia Press February 15th, 2022.
Copyright © 2022 by Jasmine Elizabeth Smith.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Jasmine Elizabeth Smith (she/her) is a Black poet from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. She received her MFA in Poetry from the University of California in Riverside. She is a Cave Canem Fellow and a recipient of the Gluck’s Art Fellowship. Jasmine Elizabeth’s poetic work is invested in the diaspora of Black Americans in various historical contexts and eras. Her work has been featured in Black Renaissance Noir, POETRY, World Literature Today, and LA Review of Books among others. She was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the winner of the 2020 Georgia Poetry Prize. Her collection South Flight is forthcoming with the University of Georgia Press in 2022.
Athens, Georgia
University of Georgia
"Jasmine Elizabeth Smith knows what a sense of place is, what history is, how much pain it inflicts-and how a well-told story can lift us up, despite everything. But perhaps even more important, here is a new poet who knows how to sing like no one else. And, by God, she sings like no one else! South Flight is a powerful, necessary book."
—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa and Deaf Republic
"Jasmine Elizabeth Smith has courageously penned a conversation between the forces of migration and the spirit of staying put. Like Mama's hot comb, South Flight is all at once delicate, deliberate, and searing. How else could I forewarn the vicariously nostalgic ache of 'the rotgut of harvest' and 'bathtub-water gin,' the discomforting itch of Dresden quilts, muslin gloves, and cool, starched collars? In its tireless interrogation of violence, desire, hope, survival, and even love, South Flight begs necessary questions, such as 'how might I chorus hornets into sonnet . . . ?' and 'is our beauty so vain it a form of resistance?' If you want answers, you had the best bend your ear and be still, lest you get burned by Smith's potent delivery."
—Ashanti Anderson, author of Black Under
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