A Week in the Ninth Ward

Cousin time, and aunt time,

and each summer a week

in the Ninth Ward (the Lower Ninth)

the grocery with the frozen cups

of flavored ice and smelling like

a farmer’s market, the floor

never swept, and the levee

holding back the Industrial Canal.

We’d walk the levee to see

the steamboat houses sitting like

beached boats, captain-less but

with cupolas and widow’s walk intact.

And movies downtown: reached

by the St. Claude Avenue bus;

shotgun houses with fig trees

and pet cemeteries and Margie

across the street and Sam

the Great Dane in the backyard.

Each house had two or three

or four stories

to tell.

This is another in a series of poems about growing up in the South, suggested by my friend Nancy Rosback.

Photograph: House on Dauphine Street, Lower Ninth Ward, Holy Cross Neighborhood, New Orleans. My mother was born in a house like this one.