The Late Years Nineteen

New Year's Day 2019 by Doc. Ellen from Jordan Lake Dam

The Late Years Nineteen  March 11, 2019

For Jaki

I was your first publisher. In 1973, 
in March, as you reminded me, you
brought me a grocery bag full of
poems–all hand-written–and I said
I’d type them. I worried about you
coming alone across that farmer’s
land to the old house he’d rented to 
Yankees. My baby was a year old,
and you, at twenty, had two small
children. I had a poetry magazine
and was doing open readings in
Chapel Hill. North Carolina was
undergoing school desegregation.
Everyone we met wanted to know,
and was determined to find out,
where we stood on the racial question.
Black writers weren’t getting
published in North Carolina, nor were
outsiders–poets who were different,
who weren’t in the dominant clique. 
In 1976 I began Carolina Wren Press
and began to publish all these
overlooked poets. Your husband 
Sherman and I had visited the
The Department of Public Instruction
and walked into a secret meeting 
of the clique poets. They were 
assigning Poets in the Schools jobs. 
I knew those people. I had already
published them in my magazine
Hyperion. I’d never before felt such
hatred simply by walking into a room.
In 1977 I published your Dead on
Arrival. It was heralded by Lance
Jeffers, who predicted your greatness.
Back in 1973 you seemed so young,
so fragile, so brave. When you left,
I saw across that farmer’s fields
a small white dogwood blooming, also
fragile, also brave. Now you’re
the state’s poetry queen: the first
African American Poet Laureate. 
You came to my Poetry class,
listened to their poems, suggested
revisions, read us some of yours.
Back then your challenges to our
racist society were clothed in 
symbols: “The Moon is a rapist...”
Now you speak your truth with no
holding back. Again I feel your
fragility, your insistent courage
like a flame in a landscape still full

of tinder. I wouldn’t change a thing.