“a loud noise in the heavens” by D.M. Bradford
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read an excerpt from “a loud noise in the heavens” from D.M. Bradford’s collection Bottom Rail on Top, shortlisted for the League’s Raymond Souster Award.
Excerpt from “a loud noise in the heavens”
by D.M. Bradford
Not a poem but, like a poet’s poet, a deterrent’s deterrent. I had a dream that woke me up at dawn convinced I had forgotten about all these other Blackhead Signpost Roads all over the place. I woke up meaning to list them here, to dapple the map with them. As if there’s a Blackhead Signpost Road through Greene. Or the one just outside Wilmington. Former Jerusalem. Dead centre of town. Right into Courtland. An unmissable thing. Along the poor side of the lake. But really it’s just the one, technically. Shortened to Signpost Road a couple of years ago, but the full name’s still there when you google. And really it’s way too much if you go looking for the others. It’s the maybe twenty-three heads, for a start, not notable enough for their own street in New Orleans. Is that better or worse? It’s the nearly hundred heads along River Road, parish law, it bears repeating, like crows on long poles. Common enough a warning, the idea gets tired as the afternoon wears on. All over again, the idea works over sandy loam, kitchen intel, cut harvest, mobile holdings, short staple. The idea counts the hundred and twenty or so Black people killed in the aftermath of that one solar eclipse in Southampton, and this time the idea counts probably just the one head. Counts a blacksmith to mark the crossroads of the rebellion. Maybe named Alfred. Maybe not much part of the rebellion at all. We don’t know now. But they painted the pole black after the head decayed. Blackhead Signpost. And when the emergency response system came along, they gave the road its name. And generations of people travelled that same road with that same name for decades.
Darby Minott Bradford is a poet and translator based in Tio’tia:ke (Montreal). They are the author of Dream of No One but Myself (Brick Books, 2021), which won the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry and was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and Governor General’s Literary Awards. House Within a House by Nicholas Dawson (Brick Books, 2023), Bradford’s first translation, won the VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award, the John Glassco Translation Prize, and was a GG finalist. Bottom Rail on Top is their second book.
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