Nandria arrives

1940 coiled tighter

around anxiety than hope

cities were beginning to lift

out of the worst of the Great Depression

but it still choked rural America with

hunger, dust, and plodding weariness

when a high-class Darky stepped

off the clattering weekly train

in Boonetown, Missouri

carrying her bi-racial infant

speaking upper-class British

“uppity”

and obviously from that Europe

which was tearing itself apart again

and will probably want to kill and maim

American boys once more in a war

we want no part of