Ballad Girls
from Balland Girls and Other Poems, page 3
ISBN 1-931002-47-9
Garden District Press, 2005
New Orleans
$7.00
Those murdered girls:
Laura Forster, Pretty Polly,
Pearl Bryant, others unnamed.
They die, reminding us
Each time the ballad’s sung,
That men will try to run,
That love is hard to know,
That careless passion comes on back
To stab us in the breast
Or drown us in some river
Far from home.
The lover sings their
Willow garden death song.
And when she has been immobilized
By the Burgundy wine, he stabs her,
Throws her in to sink,
And (for good measure) announces
The wine was poisoned anyway.
Overkill, a thrice-told story
That chills us to our singing bones,
Making sure we understand
Death behind the banjo’s frolic.
So then the lover hangs:
Tom Dula, Jonathan Lewis,
Pretty Polly’s man.
There’s no getting away:
Only the gallows
Of foolish desire.
We’re strung up to a lonesome tree
Once we set foot on that forbidden road.
Sally Gooden, Buffalo gals,
Cindy, Saro Jane:
Fiddle-tune women.
They make us jump up,
Dance around the hall,
And do a carefree buck and wing.
But those ballad girls,
They’re something else,
Another, darker story:
A tale of shadow selves
That hide beyond
The Camptown races of the heart.
