by Jeffrey Tucker
Holland Gymnasium, Hampton University
Beyond my arm the world jukes and hops:
students pass answers and threats and tongues
rolling on the wooden floor
before it opens wide, devils leaping out
like frogs, all sulfur and heat, grabbing long hair and untucked shirts.
Moses parts the Red Sea. The crowd goes wild.
Lightning cleaves the asbestos roof into clamshell halves
open to burning skies of trumpets,
choirs sounding like high tide on rocks
and I am ready, I cry,
standing in creaking boots, holding hope of thirty years
on my cheekbones, in my face’s creases and pits stretched
along wet lips: hallelujah, hallelujah, for ever anon.
[More poems by Jeffrey Tucker]
[Check out Jeffrey’s back porch wisdom here]
