The Ghost Magnolia
in commemoration of the opening of the National Memorial for
Peace and Justice, Montgomery, Alabama, April 2018
Give me a ladder to climb
the ghost magnolia
on the corner of Pleasant Avenue
to sit there with the sweet fragrance
of the foot-wide blossoms so lemony sweet
I forget to breathe.
No. No ladder. No nostalgia for
the South of my childhood
where I was shaped in ignorance
of what could be done with trees.
No regret for the white flower patriarch
felled fifty years ago.
My sorrow is needed elsewhere.
Let the treeless lot be what it is now –
parking space for visitors to reckon with
800 rusting steel columns
hanging from the museum’s roof,
in memory of all those
who could not breathe.