These , as well as various others, can be found in the book entitled Delta Return, by Charles Bell
Baptism
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. Psalm 137
We drive this Sunday south into the country
Where a white frame Gothic church stands at the levee.
The Negroes, dressed in black, glistening with the heat,
come early, carrying lunches, and stay late
In the steaming little church where they sing together.
Across the levee at the old landing they still
Hold their baptisms. A live religion deals in living symbols;
so they prefer the river, their untamed font of darkness. I recall one evening
When the red sun broke through colonnades of cloud,
And the two tides met, brown and golden,of earth and air-
Light calm and pure, and that violence of water-
How they went down in white and moaning lamentation
To the mud-brown flood and under, then broke up singing,
Rolled on the earth, reborn out of dead and nature.
Here at the Christian crossroad we note the cleavage
Between the enlightened few with their stoic wisdom
And the hungry soul of the many whose new Mystery
Is the beat of this spiritual jazz, the loved return
Down to the brown river and wounded Thammuz' blood
Through all the aseptic channels of the modern
This wild release is pouring; and we who listen,
As the brooding ground and single imploration
Breaks in waves and answer, group-homing passion,
We whites, who can only listen, are blurred with our tears.
The Blue-Hole
In long perspective rows the cotton now is blooming.
Better to come at the end of summer when the warm insistence of that more liquid than air
Billows to its cumulus, and the flat land singing
Under cotton white as its clouds pours fruitfulness.
There are men whose most casual word or gesture
Is a function of their nature and full of meaning;
It is this that we love in those of personality.
So too with a land; therefore our allegiance
Was less to the nation or state than this bowl of the Delta.
Even its crop has the softness of air and water:
Flowing in white merging streams to the Mississippi,
Fleece pillows of the gathered bolls in tall wagons
Drawn by mules over roadways, piled cloudy puffs,
Where we would lie cushioned as we swayed through the town.
Greenville was the center; bales gathered on its wharf.
The stern-wheelers would dock with barges, and black stevedores
With a splendid roll of muscles and riling oaths
Would load them, and always in the night distance
The low whistles were moaning as they churned down the river.
Sometimes we would ride them to the foot of the bend,
Cross the neck to drift with the stream, the ten mile
Sweep and back where we camel; and at dusk from a floating
Log, I have seen them go fliskering, down and down,
Bright bearers of cotton into those mirrored glooms.
The Blue-Hole
The swirl of water dominates the plain
Where water is exhaled. They thought also
To straighten the river like a man-made thing.
When I first left on my grown wanderings,
They were cutting the necks across the oxbow bends.
I stand on a spur of the old levee now,
Where it broke for the great flood. The river, wide
Before me, banked with swift willows, is curving
Again. The current down the straightening strikes
This shore, takes it visibly, slide by slide.
The double blue-hole that it broke and made,
Dug in the flat earth as a token well
Of waiting beneath all things, parting the veil
Between the waters of the ground and sky,
Deep and filled with fish, tree-shadowed now,
Where the live river eats at the buckshot mud,
Attends that union-another year or more,
And the last bank will settle, the racing brown
Pour in the green depths, eager for those arms,
Homecoming too, return to the mother flood-
Not father of waters, deeper, deeper far:-
I was born of your dark dissolving, waited years
Firm-formed and clearing for the night's return,
The melting of all things, under cloud and rain,
And recessive evening drowned in the ocean of stars.
Home -Crossing
Now a young fellow, dreary-eyed, comes, calling
My name. He was at camp, it seems, when I
Last councelled there. He speaks: " You did a thing
That struck me more than all the things I have seen.
It was on the ferry that night coming home
Across the river, the current was bad. A stranger
Said he'd dare anyone to swim. You stripped
And stood at the stern. I thought, 'My God.' Then you
Went in, swam with the ferry, caught it, climbed on
Again. I'll not forget it as long as I live."
For me, I had lived too long. " You mean you don't
Remember, at all, a thing like that?" he cried.
"I've done so many damm fool things in my time,
I can't keep them straight," I said; and to myself:
"What a stupid act to celebrate so long."
But then like water widening the gap it has made,
All poured back through the crevice of his words:
I saw the river glowing under the moon
In sweeping turbulence and liquid sound;
Once more I took the dare-not false nor vain;
For night and water cried to unclothe what we are,
Breathe a time in the moon, then out and down...
Mother of waters, may no turn or flinching
Mar the clean line of the plunge, when we
On the home-crossing dive in the deep river of stars.
Of Water Come to Water
Before the flood that year the rains set in
Pouring all day, with thunder in the dark.
Our cook came complaining to her work:-
The roof was leaking; the shingles were half gone.
We went down with Daddy to see what could be done.
Our house is like the body, the place we live,
A shell against the unforming. Theirs was dark,
The windows patched with boards, and such a smell
Of mould and woodsmoke, body-fumes, it seemed
A liquid, lymph and blood of a savage life.
Black babies rooted in the dark like worms;
The grown boys lounged, peering at the doors;
And a man-not the husband, he had changed
Years since the fluid shiftings-smoked at the hearth,
The strong blue vapor around him like a pool.
Everywhere cots and pallets. Where one slept
The rain came through, a dark place on the covers;
The other beds were moved to miss the drippings;
Rusty cans caught the slow drops rattling;
Or with the sound of water come to water.
That night in a dream I slept in such a bed,
Under the broken roof, and the rain fell
As it falls on a corpse dissolving in the ground.
In a week the levee broke and the floods came.
Strange and wonderful these hints and meltings home.
The Break
All things come from water, by water all is renewed; Ocean, grant us your eternal sway... But look, Hommunculus, whom Proteus misleads... Now he flames, he lightens, he dissolves in the sea.Goethe,Faust, 11
It is good sometimes to grasp our helplessness.
We went one night to see them hold the levee.
The slope burned with torches; in light and dark
Men struggling, brown and white, with bags of sand,
Building the top, or below, where it seeped in a boil.
Fire hissed in the rain, a steady rain
Blown on gusts of wind from the raw west.
The waves lapped at the ridge and as we looked
Reached higher and higher, land-exploring arms.
In two days it broke and the home sirens screamed.
School was finished; farmers poured to the town.
The protection levee was being closed. No one
Though it would hold but the engineer, a man
Who was always sure and always wrong. He had built
The city streets with ditches that bounced the cars-
His own device for drainage; in a flat land
They could never drain themselves. Widow Archer called
From her yard: " D'ye think he'll hold the water, Judge?"
"I doubt it," my father said. " He should," she cried,
"He's held it in our streets these twenty years."
Harder to keep it out than in; the river came,
Sat a while at the gates and then crept through.
Who could forget the longing of that night,
Or how, at the break of morning, down the street,
Those silver lanes of liquid ran like a dawn?
The Barge
When the flood reached its height the crisis of living
Warned all but men to the hills. The only road
Was the river of our harm. As Dante fared
From burning sands along the hell-stream of tears,
We rowed to the wharf. The avenues were swirling
Under five feet of water, earth-devouring.
Small boats we saw capsized, and everywhere
Drenched men struggled to save themselves and theirs.
But the other flood was worse, a clotting tide
Of mortals on the levee. It is good to discourse
Of love and sympathy, but hard in the crush
Of that calamitous and fevered press.
On the southward barge we slept over cotton bales,
Women and children; we owed the beast no fur-
Humanity stripped off to the common core.
Mother dozed, I waked. " Hey you, hey you,"
Towheads of the northside were calling. I answered
"What?" They picked it up in a taunt:" What, what,
Chicken butt; come around the house and lick it up."
Rallying thrust of the blood; but the first impact
Shook me from kind moorings. I slipped to the prow
Where the river voiced its life in roaring mouths.
May it be forgiven if the only road
I found to peace was to pour this human form
Back in the blind occult,world-nature, storm.
Sonnet written by Marc Lescarbot in 1634 to Champlain:
Car d'un fleuve infine tu cherches l'origine,
Afin qu'ad l'avenir y faisant ton sejour
Tu nous fasses par la parvenir a la Chine.
MISSISSIPPI RIVER BLUES
Mississippi river is so long deep and wide.
I can see my good girl standin' on that other side.
I cried and I called, I could not make my baby hear.
Lord I 'm gonna gettin' me a boat mama, paddle on away from here.
Ain't it hard to love someone, when they are so far from you?
Lord I'm gonna get me a boat and paddle this old river through.
I went down to the landin' to see if any boat was there,
And the ferryman told me he could not find no boats nowhere.
The big boat is up the river, oh, turning' round and round.
Lord I'm gonna get me a good girl or jump overboard and drown.
Langston Hughes left a large legacy of work for posterity. Among his acclaimed poetry there are a few that were River inspired from the African American experience.
Aunt Sue's Stories
Aunt Sue has a head full of stories.
Aunt Sue has a whole heart full of stories.
Summer nights on the front porch
Aunt Sue cuddles a brown-faced child to her bosom
And tells him stories.
Black slaves
Working in the hot sun,
And black slaves
Walking in the dewy night,
And black slaves
Singing sorrow songs on the banks of a might river
Mingle themselves softly
In the flow of old Aunt Sue's voice,
Mingle themselves softly
In the dark shadows that cross and recross
Aunt Sue's stories
And the dark-faced child, listening,
Knows that Aunt Sue's stories are real stories.
He knows that Aunt Sue never got her stories
Out of any book at all,
But that they came
Right out of her own life.
The South
The lazy, laughing South
With blood on its mouth.
The sunny-faced South,
Beast-strong , Idiot-brain.
The child-minded South
Scratching in the dead fire's ashes
For a Negro's bones.
Cotton and the moon,
Warmth, earth, warmth, The sky, the sun, the stars,
The magnolia-scented South.
Beautiful, like a woman,
Seductive as a dark-eyed whore,
Passionate, cruel,
Honey-lipped, syphilitic-
That is the South.
And I, who am black, would love her
But she spits in my face.
And I, who am black,
Would give her many rare gifts
But she turns her back upon me.
So now I seek the North,
For she, they say,
Is a kinder mistress,
And in her house my children
May escape the spell of the South.
Lonesome Place
I got to leave this town.
It's a lonesome place.
Got to leave this town cause
It's a lonesome place.
A po', po' boy can't
Find a friendly face.
Goin' down to de river
Flowin' deep an' slow.
Goin' down to de river
Deep an' slow,-
Cause there ain't no worries
Where de waters go.
I'm weary, weary,
Weary as I can be.
Weary, weary,
Weary as can be.
This life's so weary.
'S 'bout to overcome me.
Wide River
Ma baby lives across de river
An' I ain't got no boat.
She lives across de river.
I ain't got no boat.
I ain't a good swimmer
An' I don't know how to float.
Wide, wide river
'Twixt ma love an' me.
Wide, wide river
'Twixt ma love an' me.
I never knowed how
Wide a river can be.
Got to cross that river
An' git to ma baby somehow.
Cross that river,
Git to ma baby somehow-
Cause if I don't see ma baby
I'll lay down an' die right now.