March 16, 2018

“Please, Please, Please” by Lolita Stewart-WhitePosted by Rattle

Lolita Stewart-White

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE

for President Barack Obama

baby please don’t go

if you do who will be pleased

by our cornrows

the way they swoop down

our black swan necks

we want you back darlin’

your grace and ease

are so damn pleasing

baby please don’t go

and we’ll do up our dos

with doo wop

rock kinky locks

and knotted crowns

just for you

please, please, please

honey please

don’t go

oh, oh

we love you so

your smooth talk

not a crease in your tone

baby you’re our bridge of light

between mourning and morning

you wring the blues

from our walking shoes

please, please, please

bear witness Barry

listen to our pleas

cradle us once again

please

—from Rattle #58, Winter 2017

__________

Lolita Stewart-White: “This poem is after James Brown’s famous song, ‘Please, Please, Please’ where the Godfather of Soul begs a woman to please come home. I was listening to it one night and thinking about President Obama. How I wish we could serenade and beckon him back to the White House.”

November 11, 2013

“If Only” by Lolita Stewart-WhitePosted by Rattle

Lolita Stewart-White

IF ONLY

for Willie Edwards

If only it hadn’t been 1957

in a wooded area near Alabama, but it was;

or missing black folks hadn’t been looked for less

than missing shoes, and they weren’t;

or if only those Klansmen hadn’t gathered,

intent on finding a black man, and they were,

or if only they hadn’t stopped him on that gravel road,

or beaten him until they could see the white beneath his skin,

or marched him at gun point onto that bridge, and they did;

or if only they hadn’t said, “Bet this nigger can’t swim,”

or hooted and hollered as he fell from fifty feet,

or laughed as he vanished in the river’s moonlight, but they did;

or if only his death hadn’t been ruled suicide, and it was,

or his murderers hadn’t been set free, and they were,

or the daughter he left behind hadn’t had to live her life without him,

but she did.

—from Rattle #39, Spring 2013
Tribute to Southern Poets

__________

Lolita Stewart-White (Florida): “In 2007, I read a haunting newspaper article about the FBI reopening 100 unsolved Civil Rights cold cases. These cases, entitled ‘The Forgotten,’ involved black people who were murdered during the Civil Rights movement. Their stories moved me to write a series of poems. It is my small way of preserving the memory of Willie Edwards and others.”

February 1, 2010

“Civil Rights Cold Case #62 (Or the Yellow Dress)” by Lolita Stewart-WhitePosted by Rattle

Lolita Stewart-White

CIVIL RIGHTS COLD CASE #62 (OR THE YELLOW DRESS)

Mattie Green, a domestic worker and mother of five
was killed in 1960 when a dynamite blast ripped
through her home. Her murder was never solved.

Your favorite yellow dress is what you wore the night
before you died. The one with the hand-stitched,
blood-red roses, passed on to you by Miss Cora Lee,
the well-to-do white lady who you did days work
for until she took sick and passed. Sunday evening
you slipped into its cool fabric, after a hard day
of shelling peas, cooking greens, and baking biscuits
for the five miniature versions of yourself. Daddy raved.
Said, “You put your foot in that meal, girl.”
You threw your head back and laughed out loud.
Spun around in the dress that complimented your dusty
red skin. None of us knowing then that it is what we
would bury you in.

—from Rattle #31, Summer 2009
Tribute to African American Poets

Rattle: Poetry

… without pretension since 1995.

Lolita Stewart-White

March 16, 2018

November 11, 2013

February 1, 2010