Through Hazel Eyes

Durant, Mississippi

You thought words would work,

ever the journalist,

the power of telling it plain

for justice to regain its rung in the better order of things.

And so they stirred the simmering

cauldron to boil.

What you called out

came out swinging, dead consciences shaken conscious

in their ivory towers, caught

in the cross-hairs of a voice

crying in the wilderness,

a stick stirring the vipers’ nest’s venomous trigger.

The bullies scared away the money,

threw their bricks

through your windows,

set their hammers to your truth-hammering presses,

rogues who were once your friends,

still thinking as you once thought,

now strangers staring into

your Hazel eyes unflinchinglyingly staring back.

How the flailing drowning men

dragged you down,

suffocating the instrument

while suffusing the air with thundering hooves of words.

Too late the rickety corral

built to hold back

the stampede of light

already running the squalid streets of hatred,

the wild wind in your mane,

majestic Alpha Mare

rearing at the front

of the herd of broken hearts, forelegs thrashing the fetid air.

Notes:

An a young aspiring journalist and editor, Hazel Brannon Smith went to Durant, Mississippi after graduating from the University of Alabama and bought the failing Durant News. In this majority-black county, long dominated by agriculture, she turned the Durant paper around in eight years. In 1943 she then bought another weekly, The Lexington Advertiser, based in the nearby county seat of Lexington and edited and published the Lexington Advertiser, the major newspaper in Holmes County, for four decades from 1943 to 1985. Smith became known for her editorials and her column ("Through Hazel's Eyes"), which focused on unpopular causes, political corruption, and social injustice in Mississippi, particularly Holmes County. She suffered intense local opposition for her views. A movie of her life story can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/vdQpswhw7Ns?si=Xzaw7xW7Dix6sMNj