She’s the Queen City of the South,
But she ain’t no southern belle.
She’s a bourbon-drinking broad
Made hard by her battles
In wars, diseases, and other floods.

But at night her streetlights
Are the twinkles in her eyes—
And from the high-rise
On those nights when the clouds
Have abandoned the rain maker
You can find life in them sockets
That sparkles like the Big Dipper.

But when the levees broke,
Our hope got soaked,
And so did the twinkle in her eyes—
We wondered if this
Might lead to our demise
’Cause from the high-rise
You could see what was left
When light was sucked back into the belly of its creator.

The remaining darkness
Wrapped its arms around
The mangled body of the city,
Hiding her gaping wounds
From a nervous moon,
Which wondered
What happened to the music
And wanted to know
How come lately the rain smelled like tears.

The sad smell of fearful children
And waterlogged dreams
Made the moon blue.
The rancid smell of neglect
And raw sewage
Made the moon reflect badly on the water
And the United States government.
So badly, the blue moonshine drinker got full,
Started pulling at the water and kicking up a storm.

Articles in The New York Times Titled “Death of an American City”
Had people from Uptown to the Lower Ninth Ward
Pinching themselves and blowing in mirrors
Looking for confirmation of life
While trying not to lose hope—
Like Mr. Joe who was a consummate optimist
Because he had hope all his life
And when he was first given the news about his flooded home
He woke up every morning to a cup of coffee
And the hope that things were not as bad as they said.
This time he embraced hope firmly in his hand
Because he was a carpenter,
But he turned his head long enough
To wipe his eyes and blow his nose,
Only to turn back
And find that his hope

Had flatlined in his hand.
A double Katrina whammy—
Too much pressure on a seventy-year-old heart.
So days later he went the way of his hope,
And his friends wondered what hurt most—
Was it the destruction of his home
Or the death of his hope?
Talking heads serving up twenty-four-hour news slop
Referred to us as refugees—
Just before a U.S. congressman suggested
That the old girl be bulldozed—
Forcing us to collectively fish our birth certificates
From the toxic soup
To find that space that talks about place of origin,
To see if we really did live in a city
That really was in a state
That really was in the United States of America
Looking for conformation of citizenship.

The replay was called A Requiem in Four Acts—
So we found our reflections in the muck
And whispered in its ear, “Can you tell us if we are still alive please?”

Unable to come up with the right words
Our reflection
Didn’t answer back,
And we were unnerved by the silence
Because the eulogizers were beginning to eulogize.
But then
We saw your tambourine shake,
And we heard your drum beat,
And when we felt the hot air
Streaming from the fat end of the brass,
We knew it was the breath of this city
And it was the confirmation that we were looking for.

So we shouted out to the gravedigger,
“Hold on to your dirt pa’tner—
’Cause we ain’t dead yet.”

This poem, by Lens award-winning contributor Chuck Perkins, is excerpted by permission from his new book, Beautiful and Ugly Too, recently released by the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press.