Glenis Redmond

Glenis Redmond Poems

Glenis Redmond Biography

Glenis Redmond is an award-winning performance poet, praise poet, teacher, and writer. For the past twelve years, she has traveled both domestically and abroad, performing and teaching. Her poetry won the Carrie McCray literary award and she is also the two-time recipient of fellowships from both the Vermont Writing Center and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Glenis has been published in numerous literary journals and publications including Stanford University's Black Arts Ouarterly, Obsidian II: Black literature in Review, Emrys Journal, Bum Rush The Page: Def Poetry Jam, Appalachian Journal, Appalachian Heritage, Kakalak: An Anthology of Carolina Poets, 2006 and African Voices. As a performer, Glenis Redmond was the Southeast Regional Individual Poetry Slam Champion in 1997 and 1998, and placed in the top ten twice in the National Individual Slam Championships. She currently presents a variety of performances for audiences of all ages in venues ranging from top performing arts centers to juvenile detention centers. Glenis has performed in many diverse locations including the Paddington Arts Festival in England, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York City, the Poetry Circus Festival in Taos, New Mexico, and the Peace Center in her native South Carolina. As a teacher, Glenis Redmond has recently been invited to join the national touring roster for the Kennedy Center's Partnership in Education Teacher Training. She helps both professional and amateur writers from 9-90 find their own poetic voices through workshops and classes across the nation. Glenis Redmond has published three chapbooks, and a full-length book of poetry entitled Backbone. Her latest full-length work, Under the Sun, is to be released. Also to her credit is an award-winning feature-length video entitled Mama's Magic, which was recently aired by PBS Television. Glenis has also released two CDs of her poetry. Her latest CD is entitled Monumental. She has most recently won the NC Literary Award 2005.)

The Best Poem Of Glenis Redmond

Burying The Dead

Memorial for slave cemetery in Asheville, N.C.
In our town
out of sight
past Wyoming Street
up on the hill behind St. John’s Baptist Church
lay aged bricks, rocks and baskets of bones,
where the dead are not truly dead,
their silent mouths far from quiet.
Speaking crow they wrestle the blueness from night
and lift sorrow from its deeply veiled sleep.
Through Kenilworth
runs an Indian trail,
a forested hill
I could call my own.
I don’t.
Not too far from downtown
living beneath the tangled brush
a cemetery of slaves merge with the Cherokee and their trail
unmarked lines carrying both streams of blood
that course unceasingly through my veins.
Both trails have found my heart
intersecting where spirit meets bone
and I have taken to walking the block
putting down feet and prayer
on both foreign and familiar ground.
On this walk I am found,
joined, graced and haunted
by an urgent need quite like death and birth.
Call it a bitter dream I keep reliving
try to pin it on the past
remind myself of the passage,
the dead will bury their own
they haven’t so the crow flies,
pecks and caws on my forgetfulness
calls to me through shutters tilted open.
I rise from my couch of restless sleep.
I rise from my doing
from the mundane task of washing clothes.
I rise because I cannot wash my hands of this
these spirit bodies hovering
souls littered across the land
calling to open skies,
open hearts,
any vessel open
as to how they have not rested in life or death;
how they have not claimed this land
or purchased a stone to mark
their passing.
Lost
on a hill
behind a church
in a town
in these mountains.
This cry is not made of “i”
it is made of a glorious tormented collective
of a blueblack and red “we.”
Spirits torn
into a cry so bitterly ruined
of broken wings, cracked bones and splintered dreams.
Screaming the woes of heavy air
and the pain it takes to turn gospel into blues;
a weight only crows can carry
on their blueblack backs
singing the harsh call to be heard
the call of crows
chanting through unpleasant beaks
the unsingable to us,
we who are on earth walking
are indeed
the dead
in need
of waking.

Glenis Redmond Comments