"courthouse" - written spring 2017, in six stanzas, each successively diminishes in number from six to one, and the lines are 21 syllables each - so if you read this on your phone, you got to turn your phone sideways to see it in landscape

courthouse

as painted plank floors join plain white wooden paneled walls in a structure ancient—ancient

only to now-descendants of the white man who plowed through here in time as the present

of the 19th slow century counted towards the 20th by some odd twenty years—

built solely of locally hewn timber and locally fired brick by the pull of mule

the muscle and silent will of black man cast chained to this land across the dark ocean

as a slave—slowly erected solidly in the style known as “Solid Georgia Frontier

on Lower Creek Territory Neo-Gothic of the Period of ol’ Andrew

Jackson, Slaughterer of Red Men” on this flat plateau as the piedmont’s green rolls

over

its southern edge undulating as natural hill-shaped structures that move the eye as

slowly as the moments move into hours into days into years into centuries

into aeons—structures of the process of subtle low old mountain aging into steep

hills of red clay amply treed with tall poles of pine even taller towers of poplar

broad shouldered oak and hickory as it falls several hundred feet down and onto

the southwest Georgia frontier into Creek territory south toward the gulf—on higher

land south of the village of Hitchitee—the steep and tall-steepled courthouse a block north

of the green town square centered by an old stone pillar crowned by a blackened stone statue

of a Confederate soldier—sharp edges worn smooth by the warm summer rains and slow

voracious time—saluting in surrender to the North—grows—foot by foot—timber by

timber—frame by frame—brick by brick—into a structure of painted plank floors joining plain

white wooden paneled white walls—tall into this courthouse—judges—from within its black robes—

the black man—alive now and in spirit—cast chained to this land across the dark ocean