Rose Maria Woodson

Shovel

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2022: VOL. 37.

The silence of the white 

church is the shovel

that buries us all.

Black lives are apocrypha. 

Grave marginalia.

The night is not big enough to mourn us, 

as we fold, bone to unsung bone, 

confessing no sin other than birth.

The full moon gathers

the rind of our dreams.

Promises a totem of memory, even

as we drift to fog,

much like

black school girls at a bus stop

in cruel sunrise,

mist to nothing more

than a backpack & the collected sonnets 

of Shakespeare face down on the ground. 

We are all unfound.

Egg shell Christianity bears nothing, 

especially scrutiny.

In the universe of gasp/guilt,

white prayers curdle,

leave me

asking, what have I done,

in the hull of this

sun, what have I done,

that you pray me 

mannikin,

shadow,

rain,

falling like rain,

sinking under your feet

in the ghost town of white 

gospel.