Questions/Answers (for Black U.S. citizens applying to register to vote in Selma, Alabama, in 1963—based on actual exams)
By Ellen Girardeau Kempler
After you pay your poll tax, Boy, I’ll ask you
how many jellybeans are in the big jar
I keep on my Registrar’s desk?
How many bubbles are in this bar
of soap?
How many seeds are in a watermelon,
any watermelon? (An answer you should
naturally know.)
How many drops of water are in the Alabama River
running faster than you could ever march, under the bridge
named for the KKK’s Grand Dragon, the bridge you’ll have to cross
before the correct answers to my questions even begin to become clear,
before, out of the tear gas fog, you feel the shock of electric cattle prods,
the whack of lead pipes raised to concuss you past thought, only then
will you understand that NO is the answer to ALL of my questions.
Because I am your judge, jury and executioner.
Because NO is the only way we can keep you chained
caged buried burned drowned beaten hanging
in the place where we first brought you,
intended you to stay.
Ellen Girardeau Kempler’s poems have appeared in the 2022 Mindful Poetry Anthology, Narrative Northeast, Writers Resist, Phoenix Rising Review, Gold Man Review, Orbis International Poetry Quarterly and many other small presses and anthologies. In 2016, she won Ireland’s Blackwater International Poetry Prize and honorable mention in Winning Writers’ Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. Called “a timely and powerful selection of climate poetics,” her chapbook, Thirty Views of a Changing World: Haiku + Photos, was published in December 2017 by Finishing Line Press. Learn more at www.ellengirardeaukempler.com and follow her on Instagram @placepoet and Twitter @goodnewsmuse.
Image credit: Courtesy of the poet, an image from the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.
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