Oh, Say Can You See
Oh, Say Can You See
By Jacqueline Allen Trimble
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave
Francis Scott Key
Those slaves at Fort McHenry
never had a chance
to kneel.
Probably dead before
they hit the ground,
like that boy shot
twenty times,
his cell phone still
smoking in his hand,
his grandmother’s backyard
a burial ground
not sacred enough—
nor was his body
a temple the cops
dare not enter.
Maybe if he had
wrapped himself in stars
and stripes, someone
would have unholstered
a hand, placed it
on the heart
and begun to sing.
Patriotic songs
of the brave:
Lift every voice
My soul looks back
Before I’ll be a slave
I’ll be buried
in my grave.
How many black bodies
must fall to hallow
these urban battlefields?
This is not a rhetorical
question. I am asking
for the exact body count.
Jacqueline Allen Trimble is a Cave Canem Fellow and an Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellow. Her poetry has appeared in various anthologies and journals including The Louisville Review, The Offing, and Poet Lore. Published by NewSouth Books, her first collection, American Happiness, won the 2016 Balcones Poetry Prize. Jennifer Horne, the poet laureate of Alabama, wrote about the collection, “Her grace is in the anger distilled to the bitter draft you savor as it bites,” and Honoree Jeffers, the 2018 Harper Lee Award Winner for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer, said, “I longed for her kind of poetry, these cut-to-the flesh poems, this verse that sings the old time religion of difficult truths with new courage and utter sister-beauty. And I am so grateful for her gift, her grown-woman poetics.” Trimble lives and writes in Montgomery, Alabama, where she is a professor of English and chairs the Department of Languages and Literatures at Alabama State University.