Mississippi’s Moonlit Melody

by Jayla Jones

Mississippi’s Moonlit Melody

Third-year Zoey Stephens

Mississippian southern gothic, screech owls and weeping women

This is the song of the south, sorrowful and solemn and selenic in ceaselessness 

Overgrown green but lacking in envy

Tonal notes weightless in black water, muddy river music’s serenity

It’s a chill in your bones when there's sweat on your skin

And moonlit tree limbs illuminated bone white, 

Like moss covered skeletons reaching their fingers into the night

Plucking spiderwebs like banjo strings, the melodies of my kin

Women weeping, more like singing

Solemn lullabies still sing me to sleep

I feel so at ease in Mississippi’s trees

Cradled by all the women who have slept here before me 

These bones are old, the earth is older still

And it hums with a dirge of dead languages

Sung by ghostly voices, so unrefined and unsilvered

Kisses of tongues carried on the moonlit wind of a phantom’s chill

I’m so far from home, and yet it’s in my soul

How can I be alone when this world is so old?

So I’ll sleep soundly in the Mississippi moonlight

While wild weeping women sing in peaceful borrowed tones