Girls with Glow-in-the-Dark Hula Hoops
____________________________________

The black girl
               Labetta from the next house over
                            is teaching my daughter Eleanor

to do the hula hoop, to shake her hips
               in that rhythmical
                            unmistakably sexual

shimmy, though they are still
               saplings, birch
                            and ash growing together

on the same boiling
               hopscotch-chalked street.
                            And though I feel the long

kiss of history
               as I breathe in the Georgia dusk’s
                            humid pine odor

and see within the lilac’s sweet shadows
               the slave ghosts hoe rock and red clay
                            and shuffle in their musical

cruel shackles toward the auction
               block in Charleston,
                            which is now a tourist attraction,

my daughter and her friend don’t
               yet feel the ironies radiate
                            like the day’s heat

up from the asphalt
               through the soles of their matching
                            pink sneakers. As they grow

into their bodies and fill out
               the hourglass shapes that spell
                            women, so they

must grow into history and put on
               guilt’s glitter, anger’s
                            lipstick and sequins.

But now they are only
               two girls out late
                            after dinner, alone with the slow sparks

of fireflies in the dusk that gathers
               and deepens into
                            night, that takes them

into her arms like an anonymous
               mother and makes them over
                            until I can’t tell

one body from
               the other. And now, because I am
                            nearsighted, there are only two

hula hoops, glowing
               yellow-green, revolving as if
                            by themselves, haloes around

the invisible place where
               their bodies were, night’s lost
                            daughters found, who wear in their

dark hair
               fireflies, in their earlobes
                            the seed-pearl stars.

 

From Dirt Angels by Donald Platt, 2009

New Issues Poetry & Prose, Western Michigan University, Dept. of English,
1903 W. Michigan Ave., Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5331
| Home | Book Index |