Today, I am headed to Edenton, North Carolina, for a visit and a bookreading. It’s my hometown, although I haven’t lived there in over two decades. Still, its streets and buildings and stories and, most of all, people, shaped me, and I am grateful for the gifts of that place. So in honor of Edenton, I’m publishing the only poem I’ve ever written that I think holds its own, a memory of a day when I was eight or nine:

Grave-rubbing

On a sunny Saturday afternoon

We took white paper and a Crayola box,

Skipped across the sidewalk cracks

Where stubs of defiant green poked through

And, breathless, slowed, with shirts and hair untucked

To walk, suppressing giggles.

Prickling sweat along my spine

Gave reason to halt beneath a cedar tree

At that day’s stone-symbol of eternal rest

With buttercups and invading weeds.

Giddy, we squatted to read the chiseled words,

“Fred Gray, Loving Husband, Son.”

We used our hands to dust the granite slab

Still, gray smudged the edges of our crisp white paper,

Used Black, Scarlet, White, Grass-Green and Yellow

To transform his name with bold bright stripes

Humming softly as we worked,

Dreaming masterpieces from the grave.

But there the lady stood with hand on hip

Her hair pulled back into a small blonde bun

Throwing reprimands across the song-filled air

Crying “Respect!” as wide-eyed we scrambled,

Grabbed the crayons but left the paper.

We sauntered once we reached the sunny streets

And brushed the dry leaves from our hair.