Broken-Hearted Blues Poem by Romella Kitchens

Broken-Hearted Blues

From Georgia those blues came walking, wearing worn shoes.
Broken-hearted, migrant from the orphanages,
from foster cares and poverty homes to where they thought adequate work and time would heal all those lost, longing, families men and women in them.

Broken-hearted blues.
Syncopated, unrelated to anything but what went away...
The things that did not stay.

Work song.
Chain gang melodies.
Funeral dirges throaty and deep down in the burial dirt sung for people that sometimes got nothing but a demised promise, a contradiction then a lie in their lives.
Then, had to lay down and cease breathing like everyone else on top of those preliminary pains.

Broken-hearted melody, all those sobbing life-chords,
death augments under a fleck-less, eternal sky.