1968
was fifty four years ago. Let that sink
in. For me, personally and for much of
my generation it was the pivot in time when everything changed utterly. Things happened that year that shaped me from amorphous clay
into what I became. Anniversaries from
that year come fast and furious—this record album
dropped, that movie opened, a giant anti-war march or two or three, a
snowy primary and a President demurred,
assassinations, riots-o-rama,
a convention,
an election,
a man on the Moon. It can make your head swim. But no single moment is etched so firmly in my memory that the moment I heard the Martin Luther King was shot
down.
This
week even if you are so young that the only things you know about Dr. King are the sanitized pap and drivel they
teach in school these days, who will find the airways and social media awash in commemorative
programing, some of it actually cogent, much of the rest just a Band-Aid applied deep gaping
wound that is race relations and
class warfare in post-Age of Trump.
I
have written a lot about Dr. King
and his real revolutionary legacy. I won’t plow
that ground again today. Instead, we
will listen to poets.
Harmony Holiday is the author of Negro
League Baseball and Hollywood Forever. She curates
the Afrosonics archive of Jazz Poetics and audio culture and teaches at Otis
College in Los Angeles. In 2015 Dr. King was on her mind as was the murder of Treyvon Martin.
Microwave Popcorn
I think a lot of y’all have just been watching Dr.
King get beat
up and, ah
vacillating opportunists straining for a note of
militancy and ah
Hold your great buildings on my tiny
wing or in my
tiny
palm same thing different
sling
and then they shot him
and
uh
left him on the front
lawn of everyone’s vulgar delirium
for having been
chosen walking home that night
that’ll show you like
candy and love
god
openly
reverse order
A bird gets along beautifully in the air, but once
she is on the
ground that special equipment hampers her a great
deal.
And
Thereby home never gets to be a jaded
resting place.
—Harmony
Holiday
June
Jordon was of another generation,
born in New York City in 1936 to Jamaican immigrant parents. Educated at elite Barnard College she wrote of the experience:
No one ever presented me with a single Black author,
poet, historian, personage, or idea for that matter. Nor was I ever assigned a
single woman to study as a thinker, or writer, or poet, or life force. Nothing
that I learned, here, lessened my feeling of pain or confusion and bitterness
as related to my origins: my street, my family, my friends. Nothing showed me
how I might try to alter the political and economic realities underlying our
Black condition in white America.
In defiant
response she went on to be a widely
read and admired poet, essayist, memoirist,
teacher, and activist. While teaching at Berkley in the early 1990’s she founded Poetry for the
People to inspire and empower students to use poetry as a means of social justice
expression. Jordan
also believed in the power of
Black English and encouraged its use in poetry as an authentic voice. She
died of breast cancer in 1992 at the
age of 65.
In Memoriam: Martin Luther King, Jr.
I
honey people
murder mercy U.S.A.
the milkland
turn to monsters teach
to kill to
violate pull down destroy
the weakly
freedom growing fruit
from being
born
America
tomorrow
yesterday rip rape
exacerbate
despoil disfigure
crazy
running threat the
deadly
thrall
appall
belief dispel
the wildlife
burn the breast
the onward
tongue
the outward
hand
deform the
normal rainy
riot
sunshine shelter wreck
of darkness
derogate
delimit
blank
explode
deprive
assassinate
and batten up
like bullets
fatten up
the raving
greed
reactivate a
springtime
terrorizing
death by men
by more
than you or
I can
STOP
II
They sleep
who know a regulated place
or pulse or
tide or changing sky
according to
some universal
stage
direction obvious
like
shorewashed shells
we share an
afternoon of mourning
in between
no next predictable
except for
wild reversal hearse rehearsal
bleach the
blacklong lunging
ritual of
fright insanity and more
deplorable
abortion
more and
more
—June Jordan
The most famous—and controversial—of these three poems by Black women is Gwendolyn Brooks’ Riot—an utterly frank vision of the devastating riots that broke out in Chicago and in cities across the U.S. as news of Dr. King’s assassination spread. Brooks, the Bard of Bronzeville, was after Langston Hughes the most celebrated African-American poet, and among the most honored as a Pulitzer Prize winner, recipient of the National Medal for the Arts, and Poet Laureate of Illinois and of the United States. But when this poem was published she was publicly reviled in the establishment press for celebrating and encouraging violence. Even reporting on Black rage was too much for tender White feelings.
Riot
A Poem in
Three Parts
A riot is the language of the
unheard.
—Martin
Luther King, Jr
John Cabot,
out of Wilma, once a Wycliffe,
all
whitebluerose below his golden hair,
wrapped richly
in right linen and right wool,
almost
forgot his Jaguar and Lake Bluff;
almost
forgot Grandtully (which is The
Best Thing
That Ever Happened To Scotch); almost
forgot the
sculpture at the Richard Gray
and
Distelheim; the kidney pie at Maxim’s,
the
Grenadine de Boeuf at Maison Henri.
Because the
“Negroes” were coming down the street.
Because the
Poor were sweaty and unpretty
(not like
Two Dainty Negroes in Winnetka)
and they
were coming toward him in rough ranks.
In seas. In
windsweep. They were black and loud.
And not
detainable. And not discreet.
Gross.
Gross. “Que tu es grossier!” John Cabot
itched
instantly beneath the nourished white
that told
his story of glory to the World.
“Don’t let
It touch me! the blackness! Lord!” he
whispered to
any handy angel in the sky.
But, in a
thrilling announcement, on It drove
and breathed
on him: and touched him. In that breath
the fume of
pig foot, chitterling and cheap chili,
malign,
mocked John. And, in terrific touch, old
averted
doubt jerked forward decently,
cried,
“Cabot! John! You are a desperate man,
and the
desperate die expensively today.”
John Cabot
went down in the smoke and fire
and broken
glass and blood, and he cried “Lord!
Forgive
these nigguhs that know not what they do.”
THE THIRD
SERMON ON THE WARPLAND
Phoenix
“In Egyptian mythology, a
bird
which lived for five
hundred
years and then consumed
itself
in fire, rising renewed from
the ashes.”
—webster
The earth is
a beautiful place.
Watermirrors
and things to be reflected.
Goldenrod
across the little lagoon.
The Black
Philosopher says
“Our chains
are in the keep of the Keeper
in a labeled
cabinet
on the
second shelf by the cookies,
sonatas, the
arabesques. . . .
There’s a
rattle, sometimes.
You do not
hear it who mind only
cookies and
crunch them.
You do not
hear the remarkable music—‘A
Death Song
For You Before You Die.’
If you could
hear it
you would
make music too.
The blackblues.”
West
Madison Street.
In “Jessie’s
Kitchen”
nobody’s
eating Jessie’s Perfect Food.
Crazy
flowers
cry up
across the sky, spreading
and
hissing This is
it.
The young
men run.
They will
not steal Bing Crosby but will steal
Melvin Van
Peebles who made Lillie
a thing of
Zampoughi a thing of red wiggles and trebles
(and I know
there are twenty wire stalks sticking out of her
head
as her
underfed haunches jerk jazz.)
A clean riot
is not one in which little rioters
long-stomped,
long-straddled, BEANLESS
but knowing
no Why
go steal in
hell
a radio, sit
to hear James Brown
and Mingus,
Young-Holt, Coleman, John on V.O.N.
and sun
themselves in Sin.
However,
what
is going
on
is going
on.
Fire.
That is
their way of lighting candles in the darkness.
A White
Philosopher said
‘It is
better to light one candle than curse the darkness.’
These
candles curse—
inverting
the deeps of the darkness.
GUARD HERE,
GUNS LOADED.
The young men
run.
The children
in ritual chatter
scatter
upon
their Own
and old geography.
The Law
comes sirening across the town.
A woman is
dead.
Motherwoman.
She lies
among the boxes
(that held
the haughty hats, the Polish sausages)
in newish,
thorough, firm virginity
as rich as
fudge is if you’ve had five pieces.
Not again
shall she
partake of
steak
on Christmas
mornings, nor of nighttime
chicken and
wine at Val Gray Ward’s
nor
say
of Mr.
Beetley, Exit Jones, Junk Smith
nor neat
New-baby Williams (man-to-many)
“He treat me
right.”
That was a
gut gal.
“We’ll do an
us!” yells Yancey, a twittering twelve.
“Instead of
your deathintheafternoon,
kill ’em,
bull!
kill ’em,
bull!”
The Black
Philosopher blares
“I tell you,
exhaustive black integrity
would assure
a blackless Amrica. . . .”
Nine die,
Sun-Times will tell
and will
tell too
in small
black-bordered oblongs “Rumor? check it
at
744-4111.”
A Poem to
Peanut.
“Coooooool!”
purrs Peanut. Peanut is
Richard—a
Ranger and a gentleman.
A Signature.
A Herald. And a Span.
This Peanut
will not let his men explode.
And Rico
will not.
Neither will
Sengali.
Nor Bop nor
Jeff, Geronimo nor Lover.
These merely
peer and purr,
and pass the
Passion over.
The
Disciples stir
and
thousandfold confer
with ranging
Rangermen;
mutual in
their “Yeah!—
this AIN’T
all upinheah!”
“But WHY do
These People offend themselves?” say they
who say also
“It’s time.
It’s time to
help
These
People.”
Lies are
told and legends made.
Phoenix
rises unafraid.
The Black
Philosopher will remember:
“There they
came to life and exulted,
the hurt
mute.
Then is was
over.
The dust, as
they say, settled.”
AN ASPECT OF
LOVE, ALIVE IN THE ICE AND FIRE
LaBohem Brown
In a package
of minutes there is this We.
How
beautiful.
Merry
foreigners in our morning,
we laugh, we
touch each other,
are
responsible props and posts.
A physical
light is in the room.
Because the
world is at the window
we cannot
wonder very long.
You rise.
Although
genial, you
are in yourself again.
I observe
your direct
and respectable stride.
You are
direct and self-accepting as a lion
in Afrikan
velvet. You are level, lean,
remote.
There is a
moment in Camaraderie
when
interruption is not to be understood.
I cannot
bear an interruption.
This is the
shining joy;
the time of
not-to-end.
On the
street we smile.
We go
in different
directions
down the
imperturbable street.
—Gwendolyn Brooks
No comments:
Post a Comment