Never Read Out Loud
It's dark in here but I can feel
toes arc up from swollen sores,
smell the reek of damp straw
and cold mould-laden air.
Back crinkled with whip welts
the stripes of the living dead,
flesh aches swallowing sleep,
each throb ticking time.
How long the darkness?
Nine... ten hours
since sun was devoured,
bent out of shape
by jagged blade that tore
gouged and remade light
to dark crimson fire.
That fire won’t keep me warm
in this shallow tomb,
nor can I burn the light
of this wrong when finally
I meet almighty god.
I repeat my name again
and again,
a drone to drown the flaming
shape of those letters,
chiselled behind my eyes
like hammered metal.
HAM MONTGOMERY.
Letters that force
this raging heartbeat,
throbbing in circles of meat
that meet above my nose.
We were always warned,
slaves who learned to read
or write would be cut,
whipped or burned.
This is the second poetry reading of a piece from a portfolio that was part of my university final assessment and dissertation. This collection and dissertation was focused on the theme of slavery.
I researched this subject in 2006 while spending a month in America travelling in the Deep South and penned over 200 poems on that trip, while visiting various sites, including a few different old slave plantations.
This poem was written while sitting in the cellar of the slave owners house. The cellar was used as a holding cell for slaves who had broken the rules. I can still remember to this day staring at the iron rings set deep into the concrete walls.
As I sat there I tried to put myself in the mind of someone chained up in that environment and brutally tortured for the most inconsequential things. That is when the first draft of the poem above flowed out. It has seen many edits in the last 15 years, but this is the final and definitive draft.
The subject matter is gruesome and some might find it upsetting, but the punishment described in the poem was something that was done by exceptionally sadistic slave owners.
In the deep south of the USA, in most cases, slaves were forbidden to learn to read or write.
DINSMORE DOCUMENTATION, CLASSICS ON AMERICAN SLAVERY: Fearing that black literacy would prove a threat to the slave system -- which relied on slaves' dependence on masters -- whites in many colonies instituted laws forbidding slaves to learn to read or write and making it a crime for others to teach them.
Source
Many slaves did learn to read through Christian instruction, but only those whose owners allowed them to attend Sunday service. Some slave owners would only encourage literacy for slaves because they needed someone to run errands for them.
As is recounted in numerous historical sources the severity of treatment and punishments varied largely down to individual slave owners, although even the least sadistic worried more about balancing the harm caused through punishment with the ability of that person to carry on working. Amputations and debilitating tortures like that in this poem were rare, but did happen, often to set an example.
It is horrific beyond belief to me to imagine such a thing, and the woman who worked at the historical plantation I visited asked me why I would write such a thing when I showed her the draft of the poem.
I couldn't easily answer other than to say "I didn't feel like I wrote that poem, those words flowed from that place through me."
I know this sounds pretentious, but it is exactly how writing that poem felt.
It felt like I was channeling something as I sat in the cellar writing, and I'm a deeply logical person. She seemed satisfied with that answer, then told me that more extreme punishments like amputations had happened at that plantation.
The picture used is creative commons license, credited beneath the image. The music used in the reading is also public domain (free to use) Track: Alien Invasion, Written and Performed by Rafael Krux. If you have enjoyed this poem, you can check out my homepage 
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Thanks for reading/listening.
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