CHOSEN
Diverne wanted to die, that August night
face hung over hers, a sweating moon.
She wished so hard, she killed part of her heart.
If she had died, her one begotten son,
her life's one light, would never have been born.
Pomp Atwood might have been another man:
born with a single race, another name.
Diverne might not have known the starburst joy
her son would give her. And the man who came
out of a twelve-room house and ran to her
close shack across three yards that night, to leap
onto her cornshuck pallet. Pomp was their
share of the future. And it wasn't rape.
In spite of her raw terror. And his whip.
~ Marilyn Nelson
from THE HOMEPLACE, Louisiana State University Press (December 1990)
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