Readers’ Choice – Poem of the Year

Lenard D. Moore

THE WAY IT HAPPENED

by Lenard D. Moore

The afternoon sweltered with humidity two days before summer began and one day before Father’s day. After our daughter Maiisha LaShawn Moore’s funeral on June 19, 2004, we were driven in procession to Carolina Biblical Gardens. Once we emptied the long, dark blue family car, and others got out of their glinting cars and SUVs, we walked to the green tent and sat in the metal chairs. My wife Lynn, other family members, and I were handed white roses. I was the first person to lay a rose on my daughter’s coffin, which was also white. I planted my hands on the coffin. Somehow they slid down, giving off a squeak. I had never heard such a sound. It was as if my hands screamed. I didn’t know my hands were moist. All I knew was the sound—that awful squeak pierced a door into the house of memory. I kept thinking about that squeak, which resonated so clearly in the cemetery hush. I kept thinking about how I considered carrying my daughter’s coffin from the hearse to the gravesite, even though family members insisted I let the pallbearers carry her. At that point, I had felt my daughter would have wanted me to be one of the six pallbearers. When the family car pulled off to take us in procession to my brother and sister-in-law’s house for the repast, I turned toward the window on my right and saw the coffin lowering into the earth. I didn’t want to leave the gravesite so soon. I was clinging to memories and to a haiku Maiisha wrote when she was only six or seven years old. I still remember that night in the late 1980s when we were riding on Barwell Road and Maiisha recited her haiku to me:

  the dark rock-road
a car coming down it,
  me and my daddy

— Maiisha L. Moore

I still remember a morning in the mid 1980s when we were leaving our apartment on North Hills Drive to take our daughter to camp and from there to go to work. I remember the haiku my wife Lynn wrote on that occasion:

              morning fog
my daughter dropped off at camp
           fumes of city bus

— Lynn G. Moore

To further illustrate the meaning of family for us, I might go back even further. I still remember witnessing my wife breast-feeding our daughter in private and in public:

         a black woman
breast-feeding her infant —
       the autumn moon

— Lenard D. Moore

How I remember all those Friday evenings and nights in the 1980s, 1990s, and the early 2000s when Lynn, Maiisha and I went out to dinner and then to the movie theater. How I remember the shopping trips to Charlotte and Potomac Mills; the vacations to Atlanta, Savannah, Myrtle Beach, Atlantic Beach, Bluefield, Jacksonville, Washington, DC, and the Bahamas.

The three poems above all appeared in Chapter Two, “It’s a Family Affair,” of the book CATCH THE FIRE: A Cross-Generational Anthology of Contemporary African-American Poetry. Perhaps, when one reads that Chapter Two title, he or she will hear Sly Stone singing those words the way he did more than three decades ago. Maybe one will also hear Sister Sledge singing “We Are Family” as they did so eloquently more than twenty-five years ago. I don’t think I could say anything more about our own family bond.