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‘Last kind words.’

Poems After Geeshie’s Song.

Edited by
PETER RILEY.

Preface. IT WAS EXACTLY as if these people happened to be in the room when we played the song ‘Last Kind Words’ and everybody listened, and heard. I thought of asking them to say, in writing, what they had heard. Some wanted to and some didn’t. There was no qualification of any kind, authorial or literary. They were in the room because of their interest in poetry and therefore, song, and that was enough.

The song was recorded in 1930 in a makeshift studio in Grafton, Wisconsin, and issued by Paramount Records as ‘Last Kind Words Blues’ on one side of a 78 rpm shellac disc with the musician’s name given as ‘Geeshie Wiley’. It’s not a simple lyric. It’s not about slavery, but slavery is there in it. It’s about the victims of war, but forgets that and after verse four goes off into transferable formulae (floating verses).

Nothing is certainly known about Geeshie (or Geechie) Wiley beyond that she was that rare thing, a black female songster in the American south. There are no indexed photographs and she left only six recorded songs. The session at which these were recorded was shared with L.V. (‘Elvie’) Thomas, who probably plays second guitar on ‘Last Kind Words’ and might have been the author of the lyrics. Both were living in Kansas City at the time. ‘The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie’, an article by John Jeremiah Sullivan in the New York Times Magazine (April 13th 2014), is a very long and fascinating account of a quest for her memory.

There have been several attempts to transcribe the lyrics of ‘Last Kind Words’, which are very difficult to hear in the original recording. Below is the version I sent out to the contributors, with some uncertainties and variants noted.


(1)
The last kind words I heared my daddy say
Lord, the last kind words I heared my daddy say

(2)
If I die, if I die in the German war
I want you to send my body, send it to my mother, Lord
[to my mother’s door]

(3)
If I get killed, if I get killed, please don’t bury my soul
I p’fer just leave me out, let the buzzards eat me whole

(4)
When you see me comin’ look ’cross the rich man’s field
If I don’t bring you flour I’ll bring you bolted meal

(5)
I went to the depot, I looked up at the sun [at the stars]
Cried, some train don’t come, there’ll be some walkin’ done

(6)
My mama told me, just before she died
Lord, precious daughter, don’t you be so wild [so wise]

(7)
The Mississippi river, you know it’s deep and wide
I can stand right here, see my babe [my face] on the other side [from the other side]

(8)
What you do to me baby it never gets outta me
I may not see you after I cross the deep blue sea

PETER RILEY

When you see me comin’ look ‘cross the rich man’s field
If I don’t bring you flour I’ll bring you bolted meal

We’ve all been there, we all live
the distance from here to the wall
that surrounds the sugar fields.

To unlock the darkness
any belief you can scrape off the pavement, any roughage,
bright morning star, bright despair.

 

I went to the depot, I looked up at the sun
Cried, some train don’t come, there’ll be some walkin’ done

That was my hope is now my anxiety.
That was my home is now my property.
That was my comrade is now my servant.
That was my vocation is now my dying spit.
That were my songs are now my underfoot grit.
“Oh, the cradles that a man must needs be rocked in.”

KELVIN CORCORAN

When you see me comin’ look ‘cross the rich man’s field
If I don’t bring you flour I’ll bring you bolted meal

I’ve nothing left but a picture
of that dispossessed field
I don’t recall what grew there
when you sang the old time ballad.

I’ll bring you a taste of pigeon
and some comfort for your mind
but I can’t cook from nothing
and make the world turn kind.

I went to the depot, I looked up at the sun
Cried, some train don’t come, there’ll be some walkin’ done

The train called Social Mobility never reached town,
the tracks were never laid and you were barred anyway.

See my train coming? Not in this world, no I don’t.
Saw the freight train leave loaded with ladders for the moon.

Imagine this as the absolutely fixed daily truth.
Even when we sing that whistle’s a long way off.

The rails glint like God and all his angels
like silver lines running over the miles-away hills.

MICHAEL HASLAM

1. (1)
The last kind words I heared my daddy say
Lord, the last kind words I heared my daddy say

In 1965, aged eighteen and still at school, I had done well in my examinations and been accepted to read English at a Cambridge college, but with the stern advice that I should take steps to improve my French. French formed a part of the Cambridge English Tripos. I had taken Geography as an A-level, rather than French, and my O-level qualification in that subject was a poor pass. My school was the posh direct-grant grammar school, Bolton School, and it had its connections. The plan was that I should quit school a couple of months early and spend a couple of months in student accommodation at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, and a month following a course in French Literature at the Sorbonne in Paris. And this is what happened.

While I was away, my parents moved house, from a large old house in Astley Bridge, where I had grown up, to a 1920s semi in Doffcocker. These are suburbs of Bolton-le-Moors. Douglas and Jean Haslam were to occupy this house for almost forty years. For me it was not so much a home as an occasional refuge. It had a strip of garden leading down to Doffcocker Lodge. A ‘lodge’ in this part of Lancashire is what in Yorkshire would be called a ‘dam’, a reservoir made to feed a mill or a canal. The name ‘Doffcocker’, it was said, designated a place where millworkers would remove their clogs to cross the stream. In their garden Douglas and Jean cultivated fruit bushes and fruit trees.

Their lives came to an end in the early years of the twentieth century. Jean was suffering extreme dementia, and lodged in a home. Douglas, with motor-neurone disease, had lost not his mind but his body. By late October 2004, he was hospitalised, unable to control any muscles but those of his eyes. He could transmit messages with his eyes, by assenting to or refusing letters pointed to on an alphabet board. Shortly before his death my sisters, Jill and Pat, were at his bedside. He managed to communicate that he had something to say, and the alphabet board was produced. His message was slowly created: P-I-C-K… and with some predictive guesswork the message could be completed: “Pick the apples and plums.” He died and my sisters went to harvest their father’s fruit.

ZOË SKOULDING

ANECDOTE FOR THE BIRDS

The last kind words I heared my daddy say

were not the ones about the wallpaper that he
misquoted like everyone else, and which were not
in any case the last words of Oscar Wilde. He looked
at the owl on a chain around my neck and said

it was an owl for wisdom, but I can’t remember
the sound of the words, only how I understood them
as a wish, or a carving of feathers, meaning I didn’t
hear them at all. Now there’s only something muffled,

a bad line. When you asked about poetry and birdsong,
I mis-heard parrot as parent, guessing you meant
the give and take of words in love or imitation
that might be the same thing, my singing to you

across the sea in sounds from someone else’s
throat. Oh I heared, yes I heared you. Look, there’s
a buzzard. And there’s a starling mimicking its cat-call.
Against the background hiss of sky it’s my voice

deepening with others that won’t let themselves
be buried. Just leave me out. All the same notes
and suddenly it’s a different song, the birds with
open beaks and a music that would eat me whole.

TOM LOWENSTEIN

(2)

If I die, if I die in the German war
I want you to send my body, send it to my mother, Lord

Were we not fortunate to have been spared the thick of history?
Currents thrashing in whose shallows we picnicked.

(3)

If I get killed, if I get killed, please don’t bury my soul
I p’fer just leave me out, let the buzzards eat me whole

Was I not just a spare body?
Look inside for some spiritual entity,
finding it perhaps dried as though on a coat hanger
dangled to the side of stock fish.

KHALED HAKIM

O Devil sons i am undon
now turn me on yr spit
da hunter haz been gutted
& da biter is now bit

ÞE RAVAGER IS SAVIGED
& Þe biter has been bit
crying OOW WO WO WAOW, OH OH WOAH

IAN DUHIG

8 Red Letter, Black Letter, White Letter
The Mississippi river, you know it’s deep and wide…

Reading this I hear the Leeds Kop sing a Gullah air
if with new words: The river Aire is chilly and deep,
O-lu-wale: never trust the Leeds police, O-lu-wale.

His name we misspell to mean God Has Come Home
came to God’s Own County to work but saw his face
on both sides of Aire water thanks to Leeds City Filth.

Their whitewash was a call, the first response silence,
then football chants, graffiti, songs, poetry, theatre,
Chapeltown Carnival’s King David Masqueraders…

When they try to make their race an issue it is nothing.
In a chorus singing Trovatore, they are nothing. But
saying nothing, advised Dr William Carlos Williams.

Doctors were no use after Geeshie’s parting Tosca kiss
made ‘Skinny Leg Blues’ the music of what happened,
Gonna cut your throat babe. So then she erased herself

to North Venus, maybe the Nixson grave, nix’s daughter
whose records we have circled since like the solar system,
in homage, as is even this song and dance about nothing.

JON THOMPSON

V

Row after row of sorrow: you
can go a hundred miles in any direction and it
won’t tell you anything different. What
would it take to escape that tilled
and drilled soil? God knows the people
that run and pray. “I know, I know the people
that run and pray.” God is hope and
God is despair. But the mind has to be on
distances done and undone. Old tinned-roofs
rust behind the fields. But if the fields are
flat, the mind’s free. It flies
past the open land, past open air.
The old need to walk toward the sun.
The old need to leave a life undone.

JUDITH WILLSON

LAST KIND WORDS BLUES

All the furniture in this song has been loaded onto a flatbed truck
along with chipped plates, the axe and the mattock
sheets turned sides to middle

driven away down an empty highway
that leads only to no good god knows where
and the last gas station deserted

then the tin-roofed house dismantled
its whole gist, joists and tiebeams
the crawlspace hauled up
darkness collapsing into its own weight

the unbearable distances pouring in

no bread or milk left on a table to call home the dead
who have not yet tramped back out of war
somewhere beyond blue mountains
over a wide blue sea

but their voices have travelled before them
they flicker here through dry switchgrass
here keening in the wasp nest under a wing of corrugated iron

where the ghost of spring rain shakes a cottonwood

and a woman might turn her head as she crosses the railtracks
coming through the scrape and grit of silica light
carrying a sack of flour on her back

the stove already lit

wind blowing through her skirt

TONY BAKER

(My mama told me, just before she died
Lord, precious daughter, don’t you be so wild)

Precious daughter, you with your wacky socks & nose
for charity shop woollens, who lassoo Dutch talk now
with your post-bac German and skills shortage skills,
you were there, you’d know what it is that slops
up against the walls of an Amsterdam canal,
its wavelets of scuffed nouns humming unwittingly
to themselves we’re not tourists
or low-paid migrant workers, we live here—

You’d know what it was, you were there
on the slopes
above a village in Bulgaria where the cemetery
slotted into the pastures easy as a stray dog
& the walnut lady grinned at us repeating over
and over till she thought we had it
her word for “hedgehog”

What was it ? you’d know, three – four? – syllables,
spiked and ticking in a coil like barbed wire

JOHN SEED

6

 

what happened

27 April 1932

to Hart Crane’s topcoat

draped over his shoulders

after it was folded

neatly over the stern-rail

before he stepped off

SS Orizaba

into the Gulf

275 miles North of Havana

 

I may not see you

after I cross

the deep blue sea

a perfect cry

into the noon

PETER HUGHES

POEM

this evening is a stunning
range of blues from sky to
slate & back along the tracks
we’ve had on shuffle through
the seasons this is not our
destination even though it’s
where we stop between the oak
& holly if I die say hereabouts
still swallowing the swollen pad
of an age-inappropriate sandwich
bake me clean & brush aside
this troubling flesh then tuck
my memories amongst the birch
& hazel a little smudge upon the
rain washed hawthorn just a
dusty benediction on the birch &
hazel the recent ash & beech
yes let me sleep beneath the blues
beneath the lady of the woods

—Coed y Parc, mis Mawrth, 2020

…And added 8 March 2021:

LAURA POTTS

THE NEVER-MOTHER

Outside my skin: cold, and bone skies. I weep
and think of hands – stressed, clenched – his skull
moulded in the crack of my elbow, and rock him,

crying, caressing the soft pearls of his eyelids.
Thunder snarls in the dead of night.
Say light and I swallow my stomach.

He sleeps in some other arms now, my son,
wakes to the halls of dawn in another land
far from here, where a woman will not hold him

quite like I did. The moon will be old and
the stars wheeled away before I see him, my boy,
striding with limbs long to his mother’s open arms;

when the skies will flame with copper, copper, crimson
and tan. When he will stop, cold, and ask me who I am.


Last Kind Words is published by Shearsman Books 2021, 90pp. Paperback. Price £16.14 $18.00.

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