after William Carlos Williams 

By Matthew Williams

This plot of ground facing the gaze
of unrelenting California sun
is dedicated to the living presence of
Charlotte Elizabeth Williams
who laid down in South Carolina,
before boycotted busses with a son
still in her stomach, was forced to move
with her husband and children to Hawaii,
lost that husband to Vietnam, flew
back across the Pacific with her sons
to become the second black family
in a Sacramento suburb, surviving
a stalker who stabbed her seventeen times
and scarred the hands she used to drag
the abusive second husband onto the lawn,
pull the knife from his back, defend from him
the family who, on her single salary, she ensured
saw plays, ballets, foreign shores, afforded new clothes
for new schools—knowing enough of the old school
to keep five black boys from trouble, to fight
against the expectations of pale neighbors,
against the recklessness of their youth,
against driving I-80 ninety miles an hour
and the dour white face that sounds the siren. 

She often spoke of God, prayed daily,
became a Senior Olympian as if to hint
at a dignity deities and mountains alone
can achieve, and in her final days
attained a holiness we can only call
human, as her body was still here,
when she began traveling
in that other world, and—

if you can bring nothing
to where she sleeps
but your body, rotten
with its easy living,
keep out. 

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Matthew Williams is a teacher and poet from Sacramento, CA. He earned an MFA from NYU and received a Galway Kinnell Memorial Scholarship from The Community of Writers. His poems have appeared in Mantis, Blood Orange Review, The Banyan Review, California Quarterly, Clade Song, as part of The Center for Book Arts Poetry Broadside Reading Series, and elsewhere. He currently serves on the Board of Directors for No, Dear magazine and lives with his husband in Brooklyn where he teaches in New York City Public Schools.