Dolores Kendrick

Voices lost to history can sometimes be recovered through poetry.

Here’s a poem by American poet Dolores Kendrick (September 7, 1927 – November 7, 2017) who served as the second Poet Laureate of the District of Columbia. Her book The Women of Plums: Poems in the Voices of Slave Women won the Anisfield-Wolf Award.

The Last Vision

I’m here now
In this place
don’t know it
but it moves,
and they be water about:
another boat.
I can see a tiny window,
but the light hurts
and wants the dark.
Now and then some peoples
come and look at me,
ask me if I wants to eat,
leave me some cornbread
and cold tea.

They be crates and trunks here,
like the other boat,
and I think we be movin’.
They found me in the water,
I reckon, brought be again
in a backward time.

I’m dead.
I know it ‘cause I’m happy.
The children are flowers now,
baptized in joy and hope;
I shiver when I think
of they beauty.
Cain’t cry, ‘cause I be dead,
this old tarp ‘round me,
my flesh rottin’, my bones
dryin’ out, my eyes movin’
through some kind of cheesecloth,
like a fog.

I’m goin’ to reach out now,
soon.
so my death
will stay away from my babies:
cain’t upset them now!
They’s pure.
And these ghosts that come
and watch me in the night?
I’ll sing to them,
like a star.

--Dolores Kendrick