Women in Red Dresses by Susanna Lang

After Sunday Services, by Laura Wheeler Waring, 1940.

Marian Anderson, by Laura Wheeler Waring, 1944.

Girl in a Red Dress, by Laura Wheeler Waring, 1935.

Women in Red Dresses
 
Here a strappy dress ready to dance, the girl’s cheeks
red as her bodice, hands on the knee she’s drawn up
on the seat, big black stone on her finger; and there
 
an upright and angle-length red, neckline not too low,
matching brimmed hat coming from Sunday services
in the mary janes she polished this morning; and
 
for Marian, a soft red gown off the shoulders,
single strand of gold against her dark skin
as she waits for the cue, door opening to the stage
where she’ll let loose her voice to sing of liberty
and her forefathers’ deaths—sing so her fathers
can live again, their stories and their torn shirts
offered to those who had almost forgotten,
who had hoped too much, who will weep to hear.
 
Susanna Lang
 
Susanna Lang’s most recent collection of poems, Tracing the Lines, was published in 2013 by the Brick Road Poetry Press.  Her first collection, Even Now, was published in 2008 by The Backwaters Press, followed by a chapbook, Two by Two (Finishing Line Press, 2011).  A two-time Hambidge fellow and a recipient of the Emerging Writers Fellowship from the Bethesda Writer’s Center, she has published original poems and translations from the French in such journals as Little Star, New Letters, december, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Blue Lyra Review, Prime Number Magazine and Poetry East.  Book publications include translations of Words in Stone and The Origin of Language, both by Yves Bonnefoy.  She lives in Chicago, where she teaches in the Chicago Public Schools.