LESTER GRAVES LENNON
Translating his father’s Braille, Lester Graves Lennon’s My Father Was a Poet (CW Books, Cincinnati, Ohio) questions who we are as human beings who want to make a difference in a world permanent with bliss and pain. Lennon’s gutsy poems turn family history and color-line into words natural as wind and sun, rain and earth around his father’s grave in Whiteville, North Carolina.
My Father’s Father’s Children
My father’s father, Mack, a rough shrewd son
of freed field slaves, owned a tobacco farm,
thirty years after slavery in Whiteville,
North Carolina. His wife, Aradella,
worked home and soil, gave birth to thirteen children:
D’Ossey, the first born who died at Shaw;
Ben, Quentin, Roscoe – the three who stayed and farmed;
Eva, the youngest all called Tiny Bee;
Bessie, Naomi, Minnie, Lillian,
the four whose high cheek bones and red brown skin
best showed their mother’s mother’s Cherokee
birth; Acy, at four hundred pounds the largest
and closest to my father; Shady Macon,
the youngest boy haunted by crying spells;
Early the first through college; and my father.
Nine shared their field hand grit to earn degrees.
Seven had striking blue-rimmed eyes, the seven
who lost their sight. My father lost his last.
