History spreads across the Arkansas Delta. 
It rustles in amber stalks of grain 
no longer sold in an abandoned store. 
It blows with the wind through open windows, 
rattles the double doors at the front. 

Above stalks and store, clouds on the horizon 
give way to wisps of white, to a sky so blue 
it turns almost as dark as the skin of Black 
World War I veterans trying to change the South 
by forming a union to negotiate 

with the descendants of the owners 
of plantations, who bought the ancestors 
of those veterans, and forced them to pick cotton, 
first as slaves, and then as sharecroppers, 
tied to rented fields by debt peonage. 

But when those Black vets came back from fighting 
the War to Make the World Safe for Democracy, 
they wanted the plantation store to stop 
overcharging sharecroppers, and start 
paying enough to let them pay their debts. 

When tensions between Blacks and Whites exploded, 
sheriffs, posses, and mobs started hunting 
Blacks down, shooting men, women, and children. 
They massacred more than 300 people 
before U.S. troops intervened. 

A hundred years later, Mississippi River 
floods have brought layer after layer 
of dirt to hide the blood, turn plantations 
into fields where all you see is grain, 
a fair sky, an abandoned store. 

*“Elaine Massacre of 1919” by Grif Stockley, Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, published online at CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas:
https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/elaine-massacre-of-1919-1102/

Gary S. Rosin

is a Contributing Editor of MacQueen’s Quinterly. His poetry, haiga, and shahai have appeared, or are forthcoming, in various literary reviews and anthologies, including Chaos Dive Reunion (Mutabilis Press, 2023); contemporary haibun (Volume 17, Red Moon Press, 2022); Concho River Review; The Ekphrastic Review; Sulphur River Literary Review; Texas Poetry Calendar; and Visions International.

Two of his ekphrastic poems appear in Silent Waters, photographs by George Digalakis (Athens, 2017). Rosin is the author of two chapbooks, Standing Inside the Web (Bear House Publishing, 1990) and Fire and Shadows (Legal Studies Forum, 2008). His poems “Black Dogs”; “Elaine, Arkansas, a Hundred Years Later”; and “Viewing the Dead” were nominated for Pushcart Prizes.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Icelandic Reflections by Gary S. Rosin in The Ekphrastic Review (4 August 2024)

⚡ Four Poems After Photographs by Rosin in The Ekphrastic Review (4 June 2023)

⚡ Three Poems by Rosin (published March–May 2023) in dadakuku, experimental poetry of lilliputian length

⚡ Night Wind, ekphrastic poem by Rosin in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 15, September 2022); nominated for Best of the Net

⚡ Black Dogs, poem by Rosin in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 12, March 2022), which was subsequently nominated by MacQ for the Pushcart Prize.

See also Two Readings: “Apparition” and “Black Dogs” by Rosin for Texas Poetry Calendar 2015 at the Blue Willow Bookshop in Houston, Texas (20 September 2014).

⚡ Out of the Haze, collaborative haiga with photograph by George Digalakis and poem by Gary S. Rosin in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 8, June 2021); nominated for, and selected for publication in, Contemporary Haibun 17 (Red Moon Press, 2022)

⚡ Featured Poet: Gary S. Rosin in Issue 7 of MacQ (March 2021)

⚡ Crossing Kansas in The Wild Word (7 February 2020); includes audio of Rosin reading his poem