(after Gwendolyn Brooks)

Our country is over, you see. Here lies //

my prettiest baby, and her glass fingertips are //

all over the tar. In the before I told //

her, ‘play, beloved,’ and //

from the storefront piano came legends //

of the mountaintop and it made //

me weep. I was an ugly phoenix //

but our dirt was our own. As the sun rises //

now I know what we do is right. Unafraid //

I stand before the skinny boy with the //

bayonet & say ‘before I’ll be an ashen ghost, black //

gone gray at your hand like our dead philosopher, //

I’ll burn my own, you see, just the way I want, & you will //

know it’s mine.’ Goodbye, Madison. I will remember //

my country, my sun-up town. Because there //

on the mountaintop I saw the fire in the valley. They //

were coming to take you away. They came //

with cursed water, the hurting river they used to //

strike down the children of Birmingham, each life //

a bad joke in their bull eyes. And //

I said ‘not here. Not never. Not Madison.’ And exulted //

in the shadow of the first fire, then the next, the //

heat sending sweat into my eyes, that simple salt hurt //

keeping me from thinking too long of your piano gone mute. //

I suspect the boy wanted to run then //

but he stood shaking, gun raised, and I said ‘if this is it, //

if this is my last day that ever was, //

man, at least I know I got over, //

that the likes of you will never have us, that the //

street I call my only home burned to dust //

at my hand. Let them sing of how bright the sun was as //

a coward struck me down, and everyone will know, they //

will tell it always, they will say //

that one glorious morning, I showed them your heart,
lest they think it was settled.

Ewing’s piece is a Golden Shovel, a poetic form in which the last word of each line is taken from another work. In this case, the end-of-line words form the conclusion of Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Third Sermon on the Warpland,” from her 1969 book Riot.