Photograph of a Gathering of People Waving

By Clarence Major b. 1936 Clarence Major

based on an old photograph bought in a
shop at Half Moon Bay, summer, 1999

No sound, the whole thing.

Unknown folk. People waving from a hillside of ripple grass

to people below in an ongoing meadow.

Side rows of trees waving in a tide of wind,

and because what is moving is not moving,

you catch a state of stasis.

Opposite of this inactivity

you imagine distant music and buzzing and crickets

and that special hot smell of summer.

To the garden past the Bay to the meadow,

cliff sheltered with low clouds, offset by nodding thistle.

Tatter-wort and Stinking Tommy along footpath

worn down by locals. But who and why?

In the photograph itself you’re now looking the other way

to unknown clusters of houses.

Where forces are balanced to near perfection.

Who could live

in such a great swollen silence and solitude?

You hear church bells

from Our Lady’s Tears breaking that silence nicely

but just in the right way so silence continues

as though nothing else matters day after day.

And anyway, each face seems so familiar.

What do you do when you wave back?

You wave vigorously.

You remember your own meadow,

your cliffside and town,

photographs forgotten,

the halfhearted motion of your hand,

your grandmother’s church-folk

gathering on a Sunday afternoon in saintly quietness.

You name the people

whose names are not written on the back.

You forgive them for wrapping themselves in silence.

You enter house after house and open top-floor windows

and you wave down to future generations like this.

Clarence Major, "Photograph of a Gathering of People Waving" from Waiting for Sweet Betty. Copyright © 2002 by Clarence Major. Reprinted with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townshend, WA 98368-0271, coppercanyonpress.org.

Source: Waiting for Sweet Betty (Copper Canyon Press, 2002)

Biography

American writer Clarence Major "has been in the forefront of experimental poetry and prose," Eugene B. Redmond writes in Parnassus. "In prose he fits 'loosely' into a category with William Melvin Kelley and Ishmael Reed. But his influences and antecedents are not so easy to identify." Perhaps best known for his novels, Major draws on his experience as a Southern African-American to "[defy] the white-imposed 'traditions' of black . . .

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