LITMIR.BIZ

      AFTER THE INAUGURATION, 2013

      Without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sins.

      Epistle to the Hebrews, 9:22

      Pulling from the tunnel at Union Station, our train

      shunts past DC offices and then crosses the rail bridge

      over the tidal Potomac blooming in sweeps of sunlight.

      Except for me and two young guys in suits studying

      spreadsheets on their laptops, and the tattooed girl

      curled asleep across two seats, and the coiffed blonde lady

      confined to her wheelchair up front next to piled luggage,

      it’s mostly black folk, some trickling home in high spirits,

      bits of Inaugural bunting and patriotic ribbons

      swaying from their suitcase handles on the overhead racks,

      all of us riding the Carolinian south.

      Farther on, where it’s suddenly sailboats and gulls

      on a nook of the Chesapeake, the banked-up railbed

      cuts through miles of swamped pines and cypress

      as the train trundles past the odd heron stalking frogs,

      or, picking up speed, clatters through open cornfields

      where, for a few seconds, staring through the dirty glass,

      you can spot turkeys scrabbling the stubble. Farther south,

      past Richmond, something like snow or frost glints off a field

      and you realize it’s just been gleaned of cotton

      and this is indeed the South. As if to confirm this fact

      to all of us on Amtrak, some latter-day Confederate

      has raised the rebel battle-flag in a field of winter wheat.

      At dusk, just outside Raleigh, the train slows

      and whistles three sharp calls at a crossing in Kittrell, NC.

      Along the railroad tracks, under dark cedars, lie graves

      of Confederates from Petersburg’s nine-month siege, men

      who survived neither battle nor makeshift hospital

      at the Kittrell Springs Hotel, long gone from the town

      where our train now pauses for something up ahead.

      Nearby in Oxford, in 1970, a black GI was shot to death.

      One of his killers testified: “That nigger committed suicide,

      coming in here wanting to four-letter-word my daughter-in-law.”

      Black vets, just back from Vietnam, set the town on fire.

      Off in the night, you could see the flames from these rails

      that once freighted cotton, slaves, and armies.

      Now our Amtrak

      speeds by, passengers chatting, or snoozing, or just looking out

      as we flick on past the shut-down mills, shotgun shacks, collapsed

      tobacco barns, and the evening fields with their white chapels

      where “The Blood Done Sign My Name” is still sung, where

      the past hovers like smoke or a train whistle’s call.