Pratik : PRATIK LA SPECIAL: AMERICAN POET CAROL V. DAVIS POEM, "Backyard Alchemy"

Saturday, September 25, 2021

PRATIK LA SPECIAL: AMERICAN POET CAROL V. DAVIS POEM, "Backyard Alchemy"

CAROL V. DAVIS

Backyard Alchemy

He dug and dug, unearthing garbage

from a dump by the creek.

An old fuse, beer cans, a car jack.

Going for the big kahuna, he said.

He’d stir it, believing in a kind of alchemy.

Copper - like a man with body and soul.

Iron – in his blood, in the Virginia

clay of this red land.

Tunneling into the past a surgical

procedure to excavate the detritus:

washers, lawnmower blades, metal,

as if the scraps could be reassembled

into a Golem, life created from dust,

a second chance for these hills.

In the story, the Golem grows bored,

turns on the people it’s charged to protect.

Hadn’t this community too been betrayed before?

Suited officials who arrived in fancy cars,

promising jobs, money to support their families.

Later, the earth gouged, the miners’ lungs blackened.

Now no food or prospects.

The man peeled off sheaths of wiring until

three smaller wires are stripped naked for veins.

This has got to be good for something.

Carol V. Davis is the author of Because I Cannot Leave This Body (Truman State Univ. Press, 2017), Between Storms and won the 2007 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry for Into the Arms of Pushkin: Poems of St. Petersburg. Twice a Fulbright scholar in Russia, she teaches at Santa Monica College and Antioch Univ. LA.

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