Waynesboro Poem by James Brasfield

Through the colonnades of oak
arched over the cold road, I drive through rain
filtered through the moss cathedral—
the outbound sun, distant at the crossing,
night, a large cloud, fills the air.
I remember my last spring here,
the air warm with the coming of another season.
Nothing was in the field, then a tent appeared

and a cross nailed to a sign. There
I witnessed the Pentecostal fire.
Fifty chairs circled a low stage
and two poles held the canvas high.
Four bare bulbs lit that tabernacle.
With a tambourine, Lurleen, our go-between,
beat out a rhythm on her thigh.
'Pray for me, I pray for you,' she chanted,

while the organist moved from chord
to chord, holding each a long time.
The small clamor of hands clapping
was meant to stir the air in hell.
But who heard the wind rising
through sycamores, shifting the paunches
of the flaps, or past the hymns, the field,
miles away the serene code

of successive beats upon the tracks. . . .
Yet what I remember most about Waynesboro,
governed still by its white grandees,
is an old woman, black, standing alone
on a hillside, watching from scrub grass,
waiting as the last passenger
run between Savannah and Atlanta
approached town, not to stop here,

never having stopped here, its whistle
like salvation blaring only nearer
before it was gone. Forever for me
she stands there, facing that train
as now on this road the dark, inbound
stillness trails the long freight of light.
She stands there, like the eternal
white sun over a tin-roofed shack.

Mechanical blades beat time, sweeping
rain from the glass. She is here—
borne up motionless above the crossties,
a place in mind, through the moonless night.