Hush Harbor
Hush Harbor
Ending with a line from James Weldon Johnson
Julie L. Moore
~ for Dr. Rev. Sarah Farmer
“Holy body and slave body act the same.”
~ Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race“[I]n this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard.” ~Toni Morrison, Beloved
It is much too late for silence,
the preacher urges, her voice
a brilliant blossom of need
rooted in reason for our being.
Congregating in the hollow
of the merciful woods
just outside plantations,
slaves, she says, sang to the hills,
to the holy night,
decoding Scripture
with their African rhythms,
their feet pounding the earth, hard,
dancing like nude King David
to the tune of truth
they’d captured beyond
the earshot of every snow-
white soul whose stripes
they bore. They claimed
their bodies, called
them ubuntu: I am because
we are. Let them lead us,
she implores.
They are not mere
witnesses in the clouds,
mizzling tears
upon our heads.
They are not hushed
in the harbor of chaos
and torment, the land
of ignorance and want
where we live,
this place with bullets
bombinating
in the unclean air,
families birdcaged
mid-flight.
Can you hear
our forebears’ psalms
pulsing in the soil,
sense the thrum
of their blood’s
ontological chord
reverberating
in the trees,
for you and you,
bound up
in mine and ours,
yes, diminishing
in the foul face
of stigma and scorn,
but crescendoing, too,
in Jesus, Jesus, Jesus—
living up to his sweet name
till earth and heaven ring?
Julie L. Moore
Poet & Professor
Julie is a six-time Pushcart Prize nominee, the author of four poetry collections, including, most recently, Full Worm Moon, which won a 2018 Woodrow Hall Top Shelf Award and received honorable mention for the Conference on Christianity and Literature's 2018 Book of the Year Award. Her poetry has appeared in African American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Image, and more. She is the Writing Center Director at Taylor University, where she is also the poetry editor for Relief Journal. Learn more about her work at julielmoore.com
Photography by Igor Lypnytskyi