Slave Gag

Heavy, heavy in my hand, like an iron horseshoe
hammered flat, with a small tongue inside it
to rest on the tongue of a person
who should be quiet, gagged.
In fifth grade we didn’t understand the abstraction, slave,
but I knew that this horror I was holding
had been intended for someone
with a mouth for talking, for singing,
for saying something when it was time to be quiet.

There in the classroom
I tried to imagine it in a mouth,
in a person working in a field, in my mouth,
on my tongue, but my mind
spit out the image because it could
weight the heft of that thing in my hand,
or touch what once touched someone
who stood in a field wanting desperately to sing
or curse the empty sky.

Jeanie Thompson has published three collections of poetry, White for Harvest: New and Selected Poems (River City Publishing, 2001), Witness (Black Belt Press, 1995), and How to Enter the River (Holy Cow! Press, 1985), as well as three chapbooks. Her poems, interviews with writers, and critical articles have appeared in Antaeus, Crazyhorse, Ironwood, North American Review, New England Review, and Southern Review. She holds an MFA from the University of Alabama, where she was founding editor of Black Warrior Review. Since 1994, she has directed the Alabama Writers’ Forum, a statewide literary arts organization in Montgomery. She is a poetry faculty member in the Brief Residency MFA Writing Program at Spalding University.

Poem reprinted, by permission of author, from White For Harvest, River City Press, 2001.