Al Black's Poetry of the People with Marjory Wentworth

This week's Poet of the People is Marjory Wentworth. Marjory Wentworth was and is poetry in South Carolina. She inspired us to become more than we had been and even though she has relocated to Ohio she continues to return and uplift South Carolina poets. Her influence will resonate through the poetry of South Carolina for decades beyond our living. 

Talking with Marjory on the phone is a gift of light.

-Al Black

MARJORY WENTWORTH is the New York Times bestselling author of Out of Wonder, Poems Celebrating Poets (with Kwame Alexander and Chris Colderley). Her books of poetry include Noticing Eden, Despite Gravity, The Endless Repetition of an Ordinary Miracle and New and Selected Poems. Her poems have been nominated for The Pushcart Prize 7 times. She is also the co-writer of We Are Charleston, Tragedy and Triumph at Mother Emanuel, with Herb Frazier and Dr. Bernard Powers and Taking a Stand, The Evolution of Human Rights, with Juan E. Mendez. She is co-editor with Kwame Dawes of Seeking, Poetry and Prose inspired by the Art of Jonathan Green, and the author of the prizewinning children’s story Shackles. She served as the poet laureate of South Carolina from 2003-2020, and in 2021 she received The SC Governor’s Award for the Arts. Her archives are held at the James B. Duke Library at Furman University. Wentworth teaches at Wright State University. She was named a Black Earth Institute Fellow for 2022-25. For further information see marjorytwentworth.com.

The Architecture of Containment

 

Enslaved Quarters Part 1

 

In the small square bedroom

Above the kitchen, heat rising

From the stove in waves so heavy

It was almost visible. A family

trying to sleep here, would lie still

As long as possible, tossing

And turning beneath moonlight, pouring

Through the only open window.

 

Sometimes a breeze

Carrying the scent of the sea

Rippled through the thick air

As if it could change everything

 

But the window turned in

On itself, on them and their entire world

 

The city beyond the high walls

Was as far away as the moon itself

 

Even the horses, snorting

In the stables

Across the courtyard

Could sometimes see beyond these walls

 

Flocks of seagulls would often

Find their way here

Strutting across rooftops 

Then rising through the line

Of magnolias

High above the walls

some would hover, almost still

Suspended in the air like hope

  

For The Poetics of Witness program, the Gibbes Museum of Art, Sep. 20, 2023 

  

1937

 

I never imagined my grandmother at rest,

until I saw the Dorothea Lange photograph

of a sharecropper wife and mother of seven

children near Chesenee, South Carolina;

because this woman is so relaxed,

as if her endless work is done.

Sitting on a chair – one arm stretched across

her swollen belly, the other hand

holding her chin; deep in thought,

her eyes are focused on something outside

the frame, dreaming into the distance,

she looks as if she can see beyond

the cotton fields and the small town

where she was born,

before the babies came one after the other,

before the lean years, when the store

still had barrels full of flour,

oats, and rows of sugary canned fruit

lining the dusty shelves.

After the war to end all wars,

she was young, and life was sweet,

the way it must have seemed

to my grandmother, before giving

birth to eight children on the kitchen table

in the gabled house on a bog road

across the stand of apple trees

in West Bethel, Maine, where snowdrifts

reached the roof most winters

and mud clogged the roads each spring.

 

In Hebrew, Bethel means house of God.

Sometimes, she must have wondered

where God was in that house west of Bethel,

those grueling years of war and rationing,

when the babies came one after the other. 

My mother, number 5, was the fattest. 

After three boys in a row, she was adored –

the only one to find a tangerine in the toe

of her Christmas stocking, beneath peppermints

and a pair of red mittens knit by her mother. 

She had never seen a tangerine,

and did not know how to eat it. At first,

she thought it was a ball that she could roll

across the floor and watch the black barn cat

try to catch it. This story was her easy way

of explaining how poor they were,

and how my grandmother could make a holiday

out of almost nothing.  Like the mother

in the photograph in Chesnee, South Carolina,

who sat down at the end of the long day,

watched the sun setting over the peach trees,

this woman who believed that the pink light

spreading across the tops of the flowering

branches was shining just for her.

 

 

Inspired by the exhibition The Bitter Years:  Dorthea Lange and Walter Evans Photography from the Martin Z Marguiles/”Sharecropper wife and mother of seven children, Near Chesnee, South Carolina” photographer Dorthea Lange

  

Flight

 

Clouds disassembling

Breathless in sunlight

 

Solid as the afternoon

I am not a part of

 

That is the place

I am looking for

 

The earth’s magnet

Of troubles, spinning

 

As far away

As I am travelling

 

 Nothing is Abandoned

 

Lined with miles of tangled vines,

coconut palms and bananas

growing thick and green,

 

the dirt road to the market

climbs through clumps of tangerine

bougainvillea and trees

 

laden with lemons and limes,

passing pink painted box homes

where bright laundry is always

 

drying outside on the line,

and roosters pecking at the earth

announce the day triumphant.

 

The road is the color

of the sun rising over the sea.

There is smoke on the wind

 

and prayers playing on the radio,

as the road fills with people   

walking in the same direction.

 

Everyone carries something:

buckets of picked peanuts, 

a small child on her mother’s back,

 

bags filled with mangoes, sugar cane

stacked on a tray. An endless

array of items passes by, from loaves

 

of bread to used batteries;

nothing goes to waste

in this roadside economy.

 

And nothing is abandoned

on this road pulsing with light

and the gifts the world brings.

  

Ghana, 2014