Book Report on Abe

Momma did not shoot him.
She did not abduct him into the slavery
He would free others from. She just saw
His photograph and fell in love because
Her father was a boy in Sweden who grew
To have a similar countenance,
This sometime after Abe was no longer going on.

History is not a muzzle on the mouth.
It has room for the extinct and the lonely.

Momma loved the kindliness in his face
And the way his hair reached up for the heavens.
She had no need to slip and slide in Pennsylvania
Avenue mud or hear the racket of a passing carriage
To recognize he had a wisdom surpassing
The bayonets he had launched or that a force

More powerful than a bullet operated in his head
To produce the oratory he delivered. She just related
The words hallowed ground to the country where
She had not been born and the fearful distance
She had swum to arrive as Momma on this distant shore,
A stovepipe hat laughing on her own battered head.

October 2003