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| Longwood Mansion - Natchez, Mississippi |
Photo:
Bruce Barton
The Mourning at Longwood, Natchez
James Hart
In this Moorish mausoleum we
hear how slow mourning never stops
the past. It speaks lonely timbered words
where Confederacy’s gray and swaying ghosts
urge mourning doves to muse with them
among moss-shrouded oaks. Crepe myrtle’s
rose and hummingbird hues tell the only news
that moves here at edge of shadowland
as we head inside. We climb unfinished
stairs and marvel at the workmen’s tools--
mauls, hammers, chisels, saws, and adzes--
hushed by dust covering vanished tracks,
tools of time buzzing cicada song. Hollowness
follows us everywhere we walk; silent wood’s
memory lies long here in its hieroglyphic grain,
and everywhere casements frame a déja vu
that only tourists and cicadas know. We
who would live here inhabit Victorian sobriety
in the eight-sided undercroft below, and perhaps
we’d sometimes sit upstairs listening to ghost music
under the muffled doves, remembering masons who
handily finished the onion dome and the shell
before they rode hard with horses and guns
into their own mortared hell.
In this Moorish mausoleum we
hear how slow mourning never stops
the past. It speaks lonely timbered words
where Confederacy’s gray and swaying ghosts
urge mourning doves to muse with them
among moss-shrouded oaks. Crepe myrtle’s
rose and hummingbird hues tell the only news
that moves here at edge of shadowland
as we head inside. We climb unfinished
stairs and marvel at the workmen’s tools--
mauls, hammers, chisels, saws, and adzes--
hushed by dust covering vanished tracks,
tools of time buzzing cicada song. Hollowness
follows us everywhere we walk; silent wood’s
memory lies long here in its hieroglyphic grain,
and everywhere casements frame a déja vu
that only tourists and cicadas know. We
who would live here inhabit Victorian sobriety
in the eight-sided undercroft below, and perhaps
we’d sometimes sit upstairs listening to ghost music
under the muffled doves, remembering masons who
handily finished the onion dome and the shell
before they rode hard with horses and guns
into their own mortared hell.
(Poem from unpublished manuscript
entitled Somewhere West of Never)
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