My home is in the middle of an un-tamed copse
dark with curling live oak, hickory, ivy and fern
Underbrush arches like eyebrows over
Hobcaw Creek’s Cyclopean eye
flashing silver with fish outside
Remley Point fleeting Freedman’s shanties.
A ballast stone shot across the
Cooper River would first hit
the industry in the Neck, further down pock the college,
the medical university,
the mansions of Yankee yearning.
By the fifties walking dirt roads
toward segregated schools, shy,
white-eyed children waved at captains
silhouetted on boats, dark like
photograph negatives.
The roads got frosted in licorice asphalt.
Creosote pilings pushed like birthday candles
into pillowy soft pluff mud.
Can you imagine the smell of pluff mud?
It is salty and greasy with tiny, rotting lives
clinging to skin like almost nothing else;
no-see-ums, maybe.
Have you seen the remaining wild turkeys?
Tasted the waxy persimmons? I found
some growing in the vacant lot at the back
of Fiddlers Marsh.
Do you hear the echoes of squabbling quail
from the pens behind the
graveyard on Greenwich Street?
Smell the rubber
burning and the trees burning
as sweating men clear trash heaps.
Hear brick trucks rumbling down I-26
from Columbia. See Orangeburg
sewer pipe; orange in color.
A hospital appears, and those cruel
street signs nearby;
Overseers Retreat, Creole Plantation,
repainted each year in Charleston Green.
The Indians, the Wando and the Etiwan
had such beautiful words for their
land and water: Wappetaw, Hobcaw, Abcaw,
Feel them in your mouth.
But, I don’t want to
book learn you history.
I want you to listen: Gurgling water,
squirrels running overhead like
saints on water, shushing leaves
like stained glass in this, our cathedral.
The red-headed woodpecker knocks
every day outside my window: woe-woe-woe-woe,
woe-woe-woe-woe.
Bullfrogs thrum from the pond wall.
Squirrels scratch throwing hot-house pansies
over their shoulders to make
hickory nut larders.
Baby oak trees push against cinder block
foundations. Termites burrow. Magnolia
pods sputter to the ground. Mold
and mildews strive. Time passes.
They win, they win, they win.
Wendy Lee Hermance, Copyright, 2020, from the book, “Where I’m Going with this Poem”