Slow Dance

In church grandma did a slow dance.
Her eyes and her skin remembered
centuries of black brown and white bodies
on rotundas handled by the calloused
hands of rude sellers of men and women.
Sugarcane cutters and cotton pickers.
Work songs found their flesh to save them
and they saved the songs too to carry on.
In statehouses and in courthouses
ancestors’ plight debated and delayed
for centuries. Mother’s mother danced
in church-light to music centuries free
with old cries of liberties. Iron shackles
could not hold the music in check. Her feet
knew the dance before she was born;
and all the world knows it instinctively.

“Slow Dance” from Sporatic Troubleshooting. Copyright © 2022 by Clarence Major. Used by permission of Louisiana State University Press.