Full Moon Madness (2008)
Full Moon Madness
Poem © Roberta Stoddart, 2008/2023
My ancestors were Sleepwalkers.
Shame, dense and soundless,
clots my bloodline with murderous intent.
Amnesia haunts the generations.
Blood stains the roots of Pale Hydrangeas,
a thousand white lies tattle tales of a lower world.
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Cane field sermons soar to the peaks in the Blue Mountain cold
Cocks and Christians crow
Church and State aspire to sloth
at the right hand of God, in the great house.
They buried my Black Great-Grandmother.
Saints and Sinners clutch Bibles and Bottles
in mahogany coffins beneath cracked, sunken gravestones,
shaken more by earthquakes than by revelations.
Tongues like vanished bone speak of births and deaths
but say nothing of living.
The Black, the Gay and the Mad do not exist.Flame tree canopies fire scarlet into the deep Indigo.
Menacing beauty, wild and exquisite, vividly intense,
indifferent and cruel,
delights and torments, inflames and disturbs.
In the eternal night,
a Creole Cockroach scuttles through the back rooms of our minds and our homes.
A Moonstruck zombie mines the dark vein of fear,
digging in limbo.
In Full Moon Madness Bertha is born, gasping for life.
Condemned to the shadows, a lifetime in darkness,
the world you have lost has locked you away.
Shackled by secrets no one remembers,
cross-eyed and crouching, snarling and yelling.
Shame on you.