An NEA Fellow, 
Martha Modena 
Vertreacc is 
associate professor 
of English and poetin-
residence at 
Kennedy-King 
College, Chicago 
Her books of poetry 
include Second 
House from the 
Corner, Under A 
Cat's-Eye Moon, 
and Oracle Bones, 
which placed Honourable 
Mention 
with White Eagle 
Coffee Store Press 
Chopbook Contest. 
Cinnabar is published 
by Flume 
Press, 1995, the 
first prize winner in 
its chapbook 
contest That 
volume also placed 
Honourable 
Mention with Alms 
House Press Chapbook 
Competition. 
Her recent collection, 
Light Caught 
Bending, published 
by Diehard Publishers, 
Edinburgh, 
Scotland, won a 
Scottish Arts 
Council Grant, the 
first award to a 
writer who is not 
British. 
A children's book, 
Kelly in the Mirror, 
is published by 
Albert Whitman 
Publishers, Morton 
Grove, Illinois. 
Vertreace has 
earned four Illinois 
Arts Council 
Literary Awards 
and an Illinois Arts 
Council Fellowship, 
Chantress for Dead Queens 
A final salute in hieroglyphicsrHathor, goddess 
of women, 
love, queens, beneath the sycamore sacred 
to herself, while seventeen male servants 
bore 
wine jars, beef, geese, baskets in ecstatic 
blue... 
on the white limestone tablet at Sakkara, the 
door 
through which Nadjet-m-Peet, lady-inwaiting, 
came to receive her boon from devotees 
awaiting 
her favours, this favourite of Pharaoh Teti, 
this woman. 
Peet, the nicknamed her. Come through the 
pale door 
and kiss your earthly lovers. Duty sacred 
to the dead, she stepped beyond blue 
shadow, accepted prayers of supplicants, 
bore 
away the essence of the gifts they bore 
to her, the chantress, to await 
her magic— songs she crafted of blue 
ibis feathers, crocodile teeth; dances spun for 
women 
who walked like the Nile in flood, writhing 
sand; sacred 
rattles she shook to make Earth's door 
quiver to her own heartbeat. Near the door 
to his own pyramid, the pharaoh bore 
her body, where Queens Khuit and Iput, 
sacred 
to himself, also awaited 
the mating of Isis and Osiris. For a small 
woman, 
a small tomb, thirteen feet long, seven feet 
wide blue 
chamber in death's womb. Mystery, 
wrapped in blue, 
veiled her, as delta sand hid her door 
centuries ago— a lesser queen? or common 
woman 
steeped in regal power who bore 
the dignity of her own waiting 
cave, protection for her sacred 
African Quarterly 
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Volll NO 3 
clay, protection for her sacred 
soul? Dunes walked over her secrets. In the 
blue 
night of Egypt, who waited 
where mattered. Archaeologist outside her 
door 
called in vain, they who bore 
no offerings of grain, lotus, honey, to this 
woman— 
they who saw no woman as sacred, 
nor bore her songs, her blue rattles, nor 
learned 
to dance their waiting as she opened the 
door. 
Shawabti 
(African women who carry heavy loads on 
their heads with apparent ease 
mastered a walking technique that 
conserves energy) 
From timeless dark of royal tombs, 
archaeologists 
draw forth hundreds of stone statuettes 
carved 
like mummies. Their afterworld: to awaken 
as slaves 
whose labor for the king buys his salvation. 
Nubian, 
one figurine, broad nose, thick lips, 
resembles the woman 
whose photo I find among my father's 
things, 
whose black skin fits his description of my 
grandmother. 
On her wooden porch, open Bible on her 
lap, she dozes 
in her rocker. The shutter catches her before 
gravity 
pulls her through my father's face as if he 
gives birth 
to her; as if the creak of stars blazes into 
memory: the way 
rains comes—first the thick smell of silver, a 
grey cool 
of clouds falling as she tells stories of floods 
my father 
will tell me—of buffalo fish on the ceiling, 
work horses 
listening through their shivering skins.
as well as an 
award for Excellence 
in Professional 
Writing, 
from the Illinois Association 
to Teachers 
of English. 
Gwendolyn Brooks 
presented her with 
the award 
'Significant Illinois 
Poet', which Brooks 
has established. 
She was a Fellow 
at the Hawthornden 
International 
Writers' Retreat, in 
Lasswade, 
Midlothian, 
Scotland; Eastern 
Washington 
University, Cheney, 
chose her as Poetry 
Fellow, when she 
was in residence at 
the Writers Centre 
Dublin, Ireland. 
Her poem, Song of 
God's People, was 
set to music by Tom 
Weisflog and 
performed at St. 
Thomas the Apostle 
Catholic Church's 
Quasquicentennial 
Celebration, with 
choir and organ. 
These are Martha's 
first set of poems to 
be printed in 
Africa. 
Another findan 
alabaster jar, viscera of a queen inside, its 
fragile lid 
chiseled like her head. What dreams did my 
grandmother 
weave into her plaits? What dreams 
scrubbed raw 
on my mother's washboard? A scientist 
thinks African women 
practice piling more weight as they walked 
upright or lean 
forward as if into a storm, the burden 
steadied by a strap 
which loops across their foreheads, 
becoming more perfect pendulums, he says, 
as if that is all there is to it—learning to 
balance 
so they can bear more. 
Buying Talismans on 
Custer Street 
No mammy dolls anywhere; 
stalls of Ashanti fertility dolls, 
to leave for forest spirits, with silver coins 
and food 
in trade for missing children, 
lost daughters of plantain wandering 
among the trees; palm rugs woven with a 
hole to free 
evil spirits; 
Zulu love beads. Twilight mixing with rain, 
under a paisley umbrella, a Nigerian women 
nods 
as I choose 
from a teak box a leather bracelet, 
its wide band top-stitched with cowries. 
To get a good man, 
she says, walking toward me in a cloud 
of blue cotton, her dress and headwrap 
embroidered 
with red hibiscus. 
Darker than I am, hips, breasts rounder, 
sexier than mine, she smiles as if she owns 
me, 
touching my arm 
as my five-dollar bill slips 
down her front. Near her chair, sandalwood 
curls from a brass burner. She gives me 
her story, as if that is why I came: 
from her fertile cave, a river of black babies. 
In the heart of the house, the centre of the 
room, 
on a throne-stool, she sits in a double-ring 
of children. Earth yields a nanny goat, a hen 
as sacrifice; water, a giant round Hsh, 
a snail, azu-ntu fish. To bless the womb 
which opened 
to ten, women came, keepers of the rite, who 
smear 
her pelvis, feet, under her seat, a libation of 
blood. 
Then a meal of a snail, chicken, azu-ntu fish. 
Four times 
she is seated, four times lifted up, then 
receives 
the children's blessings of good health, long 
life, 
music for her husband. 
She ties on the bracelet, 
to please your ancestors, she says, 
then holds my hand while she reads my 
future 
as a thunderstorm 
catches fire, as night becomes 
a lion, my very breath, its roar. 
When the Time Is Right 
At river's crossing, the train slows— 
something to do with switches. 
Sitting next to me, a man 
lifts his glasses to his forehead, 
marks a page in Migratory Birds, 
grosbeak: black wings, 
rose shield afloat on its white breast, 
from color plates to me, to living birds. 
What will that farmhouse in the distance, 
painted with hex-circles, lure 
to such brown flatness? Tornadoes 
whose acrid bite of lemon-scented fear 
roil midsummer sky. For now, fizzled heads 
of dandelions cluster in new grass, 
gold coins scattered for a child's party, 
Wood barns of corn-fed cows seem 
like pictures from kitchen calendars 
of yearling bulls without blemish, 
African Quarterly 
vntheArtt 
Vtl.ll NO 3
white churches with reed steeples. 
The train jerks me from a dream— 
my mother bends over me. Touching 
black ground, her braids root 
like willow branches. A forest 
shoots up, oaks taller than mountains 
where female bodies melt into the Earth, 
rise on leathery wings— 
then pulls its load past fields 
where leaves are weeks green, 
not yet warm enough for seed. 
A modem seer-jade earring, bluebird 
tattooed on his wrist— 
says my future is worth the dollar 
I can afford to trade to what he knows. 
I know seven years have passed 
since my mother died. 
Where shadows stalk the edge, 
water changes from green to blue. 
In the backwash, herons stilt 
into the one-legged trance they hold 
before the view-slits 
of the hunters' blinds—the question: 
Whether random motion reveals 
more than a beaver lodge, a muskrat den, 
the silver smell of a gun barrel 
when God has neither gossamer wings 
t 
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nor bearded face. 
Lightning rakes the furrows as if a phoenix 
claws ashen sky spilling 
the sand-painted glyph for storm. 
From a case of smuggled samples, the man 
pulls out Stone Age animal bones: 
carved with double-pointed blades— 
barbs, single points ridged to fit 
spear shafts which pinned giant catfish 
spawning in the Semliki River, 
Central Africa. 
Then he urges a bangle in my hand, 
stone sets carved in runes, oghams; 
instead, I choose two leather bracelets 
trimmed in copper and bronze, the sun face 
of a sun god at least half-African, 
he tells my black face, angling for a sale 
as I fasten the clasps. 
Forehead to the floor, at last at home, 
I pray at my household shrine 
of old photos, palm branches retted, 
shaped as rosettes, to Charles Lwanga 
whose Ugandan first-class relic, a bone chip, 
rests in its silk straw box— 
that my father still remembers me, 
that my mother will herself comfort me, 
come for me when the time is right. GR