After passing unanimously in the Senate last year, yesterday the house passed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act , with 4 House members voting No – Amash (I-MI) Gohmert (R-TX) Massie (R-KY) Yoho (R-FL) –
which makes lynching a hate crime. It only took 120 years!

Let us celebrate with a poem that transcends time.

Antebellum

By Gregory Pardlo

Unfinished, the road turns off the fill
from the gulf coast, tracing the bay, to follow
the inland waterway. I lose it in the gritty
limbo of scrub pine, the once wealth
—infantile again, and lean—of lumber barons,
now vested in the state, now sanctuary for renegades
and shamans, for pot growers and moonshiners,
the upriver and clandestine industries that keep
mostly to themselves.

Misting over a lake-front terraced lawn, evening’s pink
tablet, japanning lawn and lake, magnolia leaf,
ember easing, dips and gives gilt to the veiled
nocturne vanishing in the view: the hint of maison
through the woods faint as features pressed on
an ancient coin. Swart arms of live oaks that hag
their bad backs surreptitiously, drip Spanish moss
like swamp things out of where a pelican taxis limp-
legged across the lake, pratfalls awkward as a drunk
on a bike. The bat above me, like a flung wristwatch

Gregory Pardlo is the author of Totem, which received the APR/ Honickman Prize in 2007, and Digest, (Four Way Books, 2014). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, Tin House, as well as anthologies including Angles of Ascent, the Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, and two editions of Best American Poetry. He is the winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The Pulitzer judges cited Pardlo’s “clear-voiced poems that bring readers the news from 21st Century America, rich with thought, ideas and histories public and private.” In 2017, Pardlo was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is poetry editor for the Virginia Quarterly Review and teaches in the MFA program at Rutgers University, Camden.

And here is someone we hear too rarely.