Little Rock High School, 1957
Memory of course alters the facts,
but what remains are shrieking voices,
nails on chalkboard, siren shrills, mothers
ready to hiss and claw.
Our mother said we’d learn more that day
watching TV in Brick Town, New Jersey
than going to school. But did she guess
we’d learn how scary mothers could be,
their beliefs lead boots, stomping, screaming,
lynch her, lynch her, into the ear of a girl
who kept walking, not turning her head,
schoolbooks clutched to her chest?
At our window chickadees were flitting
in and out of bushes, there and not there.
In school kids would be saying “under God”
with their hands over their hearts.
At home I was drawing hearts in my notebook,
then making lists of white and black things—
piano keys, saddle shoes, zebras, pandas, dice,
dominoes, newspapers, starry skies—
anything to not see those mothers hissing.
If you asked me then, I would have said
the students were 5th graders and gave off
more light than sun on a parked car.
It was just that we were kids too and watching
the police barely hold back that crowd.
At the school door, more screaming, shoving.
No birds in sight. And God?—where else,
but outside wanting in, and maybe inside
those intolerant heads wanting the hell out.
Betsy Sholl’s tenth collection of poetry is As If a Song Could Save You (University of Wisconsin Press in fall of 2022), winner of the Four Lakes Prize. Her ninth collection is House of Sparrows: New and Selected Poems (University of Wisconsin, 2019). She teaches in the MFA in Writing Program of Vermont College of Fine Arts and served as Poet Laureate of Maine from 2006 to 2011.
