Poem: "For Zora Neale Hurston"

For Zora Neale Hurston 


She was not happy/with fences.

          Alice Walker, “Mississippi Winter II”


Her Florida was in the South
back when the South was still the South.

She took her degree in the North
but took her studies to the South.

She caught in books the black dialect,
unlettered poetry of the South.

To find a lost society,
a vanished place, south of the South,

down, down, to Honduras she went
as if there were no end to south. 

There was an end. She found her place
in a wild Garden in the South.

Heroic Maid, the unmarked grave
is a free tribute from the South.

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