There’s been a lot of excitement around Jones County and South Mississippi lately because Gary Ross of Hunger Games fame (just for a start) is gearing up to shoot a film about a local Civil War Era legend by the name of Newt Knight.<\/p>\n
If you want to know more about Newt, Google is your friend, and I am in too much of a hurry right now to say much more. But I want to make a contribution to the movie mania anyway, so here’s a poem that I wrote about Newt Knight. It’s one of a series. <\/p>\n
The Murderer<\/p>\n
Your one job is to pull that trigger.<\/p>\n
Make the barrel appear
\nas if from nowhere,
\ndark against darkness.<\/p>\n
Aim. Crook your finger.
\nSay a prayer to your God.
\nIn the bang of creation,
\nin the deafening crack
\nthat brings death to life,
\nallow yourself to be swallowed
\nwhole by the night.<\/p>\n
The rest of the job is ours.<\/p>\n
You will not be found.
\nYou will not be brought
\nto justice on this night
\nby anything other than
\nthe sheer luck or good
\ntalent of failing
\nto leave a trail.<\/p>\n
This will not stop us from naming you.
\nThis will not stop us from casting you
\nin our own image:
\nGood and Evil,
\nthe epitome of both,
\nthe double nature of us all. <\/p>\n
On the floor in a house
\nthat will be haunted
\nfrom this night forward,
\na Confederate officer lies dead,
\nthe only clues the death itself,
\nand the broken window
\nfrom which it came.<\/p>\n
Of you we sing. <\/p>\n
You are one man,
\ncontaining the multitudes of us,
\neverything we love and hate
\nabout the South,
\neverything we love and hate
\nabout ourselves.<\/p>\n
Did you do it?
\nOf course you did, if only
\nbecause we have told it
\nas gospel truth for so long.<\/p>\n
Of course you did not, if only
\nbecause we have nothing more
\nthan legend to place you at the scene.<\/p>\n
You are the eternally unobserved.
\nYou are both true and untrue
\nin equal portions, both there
\nand not there, both guilty and innocent,
\nboth hero and villain.<\/p>\n
You need nothing more than us
\nto make it so, nothing more than
\nour telling and retelling
\nof you as we see ourselves,
\nnothing more than
\nour insatiable hunger
\nto believe in one true version
\nof any legend ever handed down. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There’s been a lot of excitement around Jones County and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mississippi","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2198\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.writerlyhaphazardry.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}