Black Jesus

Poem by Dana Littlepage Smith

After the man was lynched,
the hickory licked lightning
from a white sky.

The fiddler came that night and cut its trunk.
The devil burned his hand,
the scald of wood was still alive.

The wood, the body he cut free from burn
and blood and ash cried,
Sweet Jesus.

He listened. Long.
As he worked, a fiddle
flew from the crotch

of that scorched tree,
through the noose that made
those milk pale soles,

those jerked blue feet
arrive in me.
My smouldering

witness never caught fire.
Jesus weeps
as I still swing in the tree

of my indifference:
its stone cold fiddle
waiting in me.

The poem has two inspirational roots: a luthier named Freeman Vines who makes instruments out of wood from a tree used to lynch a man named Oliver Moore, in 1930; and the theologian James Cone’s book The Cross and the Lynching Tree.

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