Tom Lee Day will move to October, but poetry honored today

Bill Dries | Daily Memphian

The lantern parade in Tom Lee Park honoring the 1920s river hero the park is named for will return in October in a move of the city’s annual Tom Lee Day to the fall.

The Memphis River Parks Partnership announced Friday, May 8, that the parade featuring homemade paper lanterns and larger paper lantern puppets by parade artist Chantelle Rytter will set up shop at Beale Street Landing in September.

That’s for a series of workshops for children and adults to make a Tom Lee lantern, a catfish lantern and lighted parasol lanterns.

Those lanterns and others that parade-goers may bring from home (to specifications set by the Partnership) will be featured in the Oct. 3 parade along the river side of the park with music from the Lucky 7 Brass Band.

Last Labor Day weekend, the first lantern parade at sunset in the park featured giant river crane and catfish puppet lanterns along with parasol lanterns.

The parasols and the brass band gave the event the feel of a New Orleans second-line celebration and a new tradition honoring one of the city’s best-known river stories.

The announcement was made at the Cossitt Library on the anniversary of Lee’s 1925 rescue of 32 people on the Mississippi River south of Memphis when their boat capsized.

The annual anniversary is usually marked in other locations because the park named for Lee hosts an annual music festival during the first week of May — first the Memphis In May International Festival’s Beale Street Music Festival and currently the 3-year old Riverbeat music festival.

Neither event has had a specific link to Lee’s legacy. The staging for each has limited access to the monument in Lee’s honor at the center of the park.

MRPP president and CEO Paul Chandler announced the move of Tom Lee Day Friday as the Partnership announced the winners in its fifth annual Tom Lee Poetry and Spoken Word competition for high school students at the Cossitt.

Students are asked to interpret Lee’s story in a contest that drew 320 submissions this year, judged by University of Memphis professor Marcus Wicker.

“It’s not just like a prompt — write about Tom Lee and what does that mean to you,” said Jasmine Coleman, the Partnership’s programming and engagement director. “I mean, obviously some of that is developing by what his story and how he may have felt out there means to them. But of course it’s not like a direct correlation, which makes it beautiful.”

The first place award went to Neveah McDuffy, a sophomore at Trezevant High School, for her entry “We, Too, Are River.”

“The world sometimes sees our skin before our soul — our hoodie before our honor,” McDuffy writes of being Black in Memphis in the 21st Century in terms that would be familiar to Lee in his lifetime.

“It was really based around the courage it takes to switch between being something you’re not and something you have to be,” she told The Daily Memphian after the award presentation.

“It takes a lot of courage to get out there and save all those people even though he couldn’t swim,” Coleman said. “And we can still do that today just by stepping out of who we think we are to what the times can be.”

Analeigh Ngo, a Lausanne Collegiate School freshman, won the second place award for “Imprisoned” – a recasting of the myth of Icarus who flew too close to the sun.

“Do you think Icarus regretted flying to the sun?” Ngo wrote. “Or did he regret listening to the fear that came after?”

Ngo was already familiar with the story of Tom Lee from family visits to the park and its monument. She saw a flyer about the competition at school.

“I knew that I knew how to write. I love to write,” she said. “So I just felt so inspired by nostalgia and Tom Lee’s courage and bravery. That’s how my creative interest was sparked.”

Isabel Hasfjord, a junior at Houston High School, took third place for “Gardenias” — a poem about the changes brought by physical struggle.

“Maybe — just maybe — if I breathe deep enough, something inside of me might shift,” she wrote.

“It is definitely still relevant,” she said of Lee’s 101-year old saga. “His ability to save people and just be brave about it, even not knowing how to swim — it’s so inspiring.”

The winning Poetry Contest entries

We, Too, Are River by Nevaeh Mcduffy (First Place)

We come from houses that hum with history —

kitchens baptized in grease and gospel,

porches where laughter braids the July air.

From mothers who measure love by the handful

a pinch of salt, a stern look, a whispered prayer.

From fathers and father-figures —

steel-toed boots, tired hands,

backs bent like question marks asking, Will this be enough?

We learn early how to answer.

Keep your hands visible.

Keep your voice gentle.

Keep your dreams loud but your body small.

Write your name clearly so it cannot be erased.

The world sometimes sees our skin before our soul —

our hoodie before our honor.

And still —

We rise.

In our homes there is a different curriculum:

season struggle until it tastes like survival,

iron doubt sharp as Sunday collars,

remember we are architects of hope.

“You are somebody,” they tell us —

and when the world forgets, we remember for it.

There are nights when sirens split the dark,

mornings when headlines bruise our eyes.

We carry fear like a second backpack —

heavy, invisible, necessary.

Why must innocence practice defense?

Why must we be twice as good to be half as safe?

But do not mistake sorrow for surrender.

For every slammed door, a hymn.

For every cracked sidewalk, a chalk-drawn crown.

We clap on two and four, turn pain into percussion,

laugh from the diaphragm of history,

love like it might be rationed tomorrow.

We are not percentages — we are possibility.

Not only what we endure, but what we build.

See the river behind our eyes,

the homes that made us — loud, loving, real.

We are a chorus.

And together, we rise.

Imprisoned by Analeigh Ngo (Second Place)

One day, I will grow wings —

or tear my body apart trying to invent them.

Because staying here, tethered to the floor, feels like being politely buried alive. Because I am tired of surviving quietly.

Do you think Icarus regretted flying to the sun? Or did he regret listening to the fear that came after? Did he smile on the way up, knowing at last he was higher than the voice that told him to stay small?

They say he fell because he wanted too much. But what if wanting was never the sin? What if the real tragedy was that the sky let him taste freedom, then asked for compensation in gravity?

They warn us: “Don’t fly too high.” As if the ground hasn’t swallowed just as many people as the sky ever dared to.

Maybe falling is not proof of failure. Maybe it is evidence. That once, you believed in something enough to jump. That once, you trusted your wings — even if they were made of wax and hope.

To fall means to have once soared. To ache means you’ve reached beyond comfort. And if I burn one day, let it be said that I felt the sun on my face and chose wonder over safety.

One day, I will grow wings.

And even if I fall, at least the sky will know my name.

Gardenias by Isabel Hasfjord (Third Place)

The sun beams down—

dirt and pebbles

cling to my thighs,

sweat-slick and salted.

It’s warm in London—

far warmer

than it should be,

but I’ve been awake

since the blue hours,

sitting in a field of gardenias,

trying to stay soft.

They say gardenias can be defined

as a delicate beauty,

an intoxicating scent—

they’re always described

as grace,

as refinement,

as feminine.

I breathe in

until my lungs ache.

Maybe—

just maybe—

if I breathe deep enough,

something inside of me might shift.

Not all at once.

Just the smallest part.

A breath in my throat,

A sheen on my skin.

Maybe I’ll carry it,

without any notice.

Maybe I won’t need to explain,

why I came here alone,

and left,

not changed,

but becoming.