Elegy for Lucy in the Place She Called Home
By Shaun T. Griffin
in memoriam, Lucy Bouldin
She was a coyote howling the broken stars from their orbit—
peripatetic, haunted, hunted for being black in a white town.
For most of the night they came, a pack outside her door
to squeal the notes for a librarian in a white town.
What looked like hope lost on a journey to open books—
this diminutive dancer broke with convention in a white town.
To reel in a desk and chair, literature, and still they squealed—
totems for someone who worked the worry in a white town.
She traveled alone, turned the sage and mountain mahogany
to stand outside the room of consequence in a white town.
Bellowed stories like the coyotes, a dirge of what was lost,
an elegy to the mountain she lived on in a white town.
Now they shed the night and crawl away, ramble the canyon
and send their howling to sun and clouds in a white town.
Their echo remains, a sound she cannot dismiss, woman
who walked alone in the dark light of this white town.
At last she has arrived, a fluted presence on the February
wind, Episcopal, necessary, and certain in a white town.
Double Down Blogger Image/Shaun T. Griffin.
Shaun T. Griffin co-founded and directed Community Chest, a rural social justice agency for 27 years. His book of essays Because the Light Will Not Forgive Me—Essays from a Poet, was released by the University of Nevada Press in 2019. For over three decades, he and his wife Debby have lived in Virginia City, Nevada.
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