"Path of A Possum" By Gordon Marshall

Illustration by Samantha Scott-Heron



V

Take down the Back River Bridge
From Hingham to East Weymouth,
Let the robin fly

As the crow flies,
Breaking the color barrier,
Orange as the day.

Suspend the stylus
From the broken record
Stuck on Butane James

Whipping his Famous Flames
With a holler and curse.
Call the nurse;

The Patriots got burned.
Brady walks with a cane
Like God,

Rides to the circus in a Cadillac
With Billy Barnum,
Patriarch of poets.

The sun is set to rise
At six,
This early November day.

Billy sees the cotton candy clouds
Clustering round the star
Taking cameo tinge.

Jennifer holds Celia in her body,
Cameo in her palm,
Cameo that was Ann’s and will be Celia’s,

Celia Ann’s.
Granny Ann who always hated Nixon
Knew he played marked cards.

Granny who conversed with Miss Lillian,
Jimmy Carter’s mother,
Who lauded Walter Mondale

For running with a woman,
Who always went Democrat
Except when she liked Dole.

Who wrestled with the question
Of living after life,
And saw she would live on through her students.

She saw that afterlife was earthbound,
Heaven tumbling in the winds
Whipping her strawberries

Like James Brown Whipping the Flames
At the Apollo
In 1960

Dawn of race riots
In Atlanta
And Alabama,

Granny using Kennedy
To define charisma
In her classroom in Connecticut

Watching his rise
Watching him die
A month after I was born.

She taught her students how to get involved
With Washington,
Even Wall Street,

Buying stock with them
And forwarding the liquidated sum
To each one ten years on.

These were the grassroots
She sowed throughout New England and New York,
Nesting the nation’s robin.