New Road Station

New Road Station Tracy K. Smith (bio) History is in a hurry. It moves like a woman Corralling her children onto a crowded bus. History spits Go, go, go, lurching at the horizon, Hammering the driver’s headrest with her fist. Nothing else moves. The flies settle in place Watching with their million eyes, never bored. The crows strike their bargain with the breeze. They cluck and caw at the women in their frenzy, The ones who suck their teeth, whose skirts Are bathed in mud. But history is not a woman, And it is not the crowd forming in a square. It is not the bright swarm of voices chanting No And Now, or even the rapt silence of a room Where a film of history is right now being screened. Perhaps history is the bus that will only wait so long Before [cranking its engine and] barreling down The road. Maybe it is the voice coming in Through the radio like a long distance call. Or the child in the crook of his mother’s arm Who believes history must sleep inside a tomb, Or the belly of a bomb. [End Page 343] Tracy K. Smith Tracy K. Smith is author of three volumes of poems, The Body’s Question (winner of the 2002 Cave Canem Prize for the best first book by an African American poet), Duende (winner of the 2006 James Laughlin Award), and, recently, Life on Mars. She is an assistant professor teaching creative writing at Princeton University. Copyright © 2012 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Art · Art history · Nothing · Siege · Silence · Visual arts · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Philosophy

• Author and Title Index to Callaloo Volume 35 (Whole Numbers 130–133)

  Kathryn B Karasek, Hannah Sears•Callaloo•2012

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