The other day I was reading through this
poem book I have and I came across this one that's one of my favorites.
The author is talking about New Orleans so I thought I'd share it with
you all! Krista
YARROW-BY, ANDREA GIBSON
We packed our lives into the back of your truck
and drove two thousand miles back to the only home you’d ever known.
On the bayou you ate crawfish.
I wished I had never become a vegetarian.
Here, whatever you came carrying fell to the ground like Creole swamp rain.
Uptown you could watch the jazz notes float from porch swings to sidewalks of little girls playing jump rope and hopscotch,
to old women skipping rocks across the gulf of the Mississippi like heartbeats they forgot they had, while mid-city trombones wrote love poems in lonely men’s ears.
For a year we were gardeners.
“No, Andrea, yarrow doesn’t grow here,
imagine a womb full of water,
plant like you would plant a daughter,
name her Iris, Rose, Magnolia, and Gardenia.”
You could hold the soil between your fingers and smell gumbo and harmonicas.
Could smell po-boys and cathedrals on the same block.
“What do ya mean, you don’t talk to strangers?
Come inside and see a picture of my son, he raises hell, but he’s a good one…”
Iris, Rose, Magnolia, Gardenia,
when I heard of Katrina I thought, “The flowers, save the flowers…”
I never thought for a second we wouldn’t save the people
YARROW-BY, ANDREA GIBSON
We packed our lives into the back of your truck
and drove two thousand miles back to the only home you’d ever known.
On the bayou you ate crawfish.
I wished I had never become a vegetarian.
Here, whatever you came carrying fell to the ground like Creole swamp rain.
Uptown you could watch the jazz notes float from porch swings to sidewalks of little girls playing jump rope and hopscotch,
to old women skipping rocks across the gulf of the Mississippi like heartbeats they forgot they had, while mid-city trombones wrote love poems in lonely men’s ears.
For a year we were gardeners.
“No, Andrea, yarrow doesn’t grow here,
imagine a womb full of water,
plant like you would plant a daughter,
name her Iris, Rose, Magnolia, and Gardenia.”
You could hold the soil between your fingers and smell gumbo and harmonicas.
Could smell po-boys and cathedrals on the same block.
“What do ya mean, you don’t talk to strangers?
Come inside and see a picture of my son, he raises hell, but he’s a good one…”
Iris, Rose, Magnolia, Gardenia,
when I heard of Katrina I thought, “The flowers, save the flowers…”
I never thought for a second we wouldn’t save the people
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