Photo: Denley Photography via Unsplash.
Poem: What is written on A Slat Of Wood
'I bought the book...'
I bought the book, A Slat Of Wood,
stark, heartening poems by Helen Morgan Brooks.
Scooped it up from The Net,
found this first edition in a listing by
The Corner Bookshop, Bath, Water Street,
Maine, America, just before the tariffs took effect.
Inside this slim cardboard cover is a label
stating the collection had originally been acquired by
Friends Book Store, at Yearly Meeting Arch Street,
Philadelphia in 1977. You get my meaning?
What is written in A Slat Of Wood
is a story about a slave-child, John Edwin Morgan,
who sees a white boy writing on a slat of wood.
To cut a fine Brooks poem short, this narrative
tells how identity scribes names acquired by ownership…
buy a book, buy a boy, buy belief, buy a
100 acres of cedar trees and cotton fields,
buy a tribe of people and the business of being
their promised land.
In so doing you have acquired their souls
branded as your belongings.
This little boy knew enough,
that the name he’d acquired and asked
to have written on A Slat Of Wood,
marked him somehow.
That might have been the end of it
but this bright little boy took
what he’d been given, read those
dumb words, learnt to voice them,
wrote legal documents because
his signature had authority.
Eventually John Edwin Morgan understood
what he’d acquired written on A Slat Of Wood.
Steve says: the poem links to the history of a key figure among black Quaker poets in the USA. Helen Morgan Brooks, born 4 March 1904, died 6 October 1989 at Kendal-Crosslands, Longwood, a Quaker retirement community in Chester County, Pennsylvania.
