Monuments

M

Myra Sklarew

Today the moon sees fit to come between a parched earth

and sun, hurrying the premature darkness. A rooster in the yard

cuts off its crowing, fooled into momentary sleep.

And soon the Perseid showers, broken bits

of the ancient universe, will pass through the skin of our

atmosphere. Time and space are alive over our city.

Final eclipse of the sun, last of this millennium, our city’s

brightness broken off. We have known other dark hours:

Here, coffin that slowly passes, I give you my sprig

of lilac—Lincoln’s death, winding procession toward sleep.

We have known slave coffles and holding pens in yards

not half a mile from our Capitol, wooden palings sunk in earth

to guarantee none would escape. In this freest city. Oh if earth

could talk. Earth does talk in the neatly framed yards

where death thinks to lay us down to rest. Asleep,

the marker stones. But not the voices, jagged bits

of memory, shards of poems. Sterling Brown. Our

human possessions and all they've left us. This whole city

sings their songs. Say their names. In this city

they are our monuments: Frederick Douglass, our

Rayford Logan, Alain Locke, Franklin Frazier, Georgia

Douglas Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, May Miller: Not sleep

but garlands left to us. Montague Cobb, William Hastie. Yards

of names. And here, the place where we unearth

an immigrant father of seven. He leans down—no earthly

reason for his choice—to pick up his nearest child. A yard-long

rack of brooms behind him, a bin of apples. Not the sleep

of cold, but autumn in Washington. 1913 or a bit

later. He stands awkwardly on 4 1/2 Street, S. W. as our

street photographer, who’s just come by with his city

chatter, ducks beneath a dark cloth. Monuments of the city

behind him, he leans over his black box camera in time to capture

that moment when the child will play her bit

part, pushing away from her father like a boat from shore. In the sleep

of winter, years later, she will become my mother. What yardstick

by which to measure importance? To measure earthly

agency? Each of us has monuments in the bone case of memory. Earth-

bound, I take my sac of marble and carry it down lonely city streets where our

generals on horseback and a tall bearded man keep watch over all their citizens.

60

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