Echoes: Verse 6, Audre Lorde

So, one of my readers called me out on the fact that I had yet to give and Echoes feature to a female poet and I realized they were right. Here is my first attempt to correct that with a poem from one of the fiercest sisters to ever pick-up a pen.

*drum roll*

Power

by Audre Lorde

The difference between poetry and rhetoric

is being ready to kill

yourself

instead of your children.

I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds

and a dead child dragging his shattered black

face off the edge of my sleep

blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders

is the only liquid for miles

and my stomach

churns at the imagined taste while

my mouth splits into the wetness of his blood

as it sinks into the whiteness

of the desert where I am lost

without imagery or magic

trying to make power out of hatred and destruction

trying to heal my dying son with kisses

only the sun will bleach his bones quicker.

A policeman who shot down a ten year old in Queens

stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood

and a voice said "Die you little motherfucker" and

there are tapes to prove it. At his trial

this policeman said in his own defense

"I didn't notice the size nor nothing else

only the color." And

there are tapes to prove that, too.

Today that 37 year old white man

with 13 years of police forcing

was set free

by eleven white men who said they were satisfied

justice had been done

and one Black Woman who said

"They convinced me" meaning

they had dragged her 4'10" Black Woman's frame

over the hot coals

of four centuries of white approval

until she let go

the firs real power she ever had

to make a graveyard for our children.

I have not been able to touch destruction

within me.

But unless I learn to use

the difference between poetry and rhetoric

my power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold

or lie limp and useless as a an unconnected wire

and one day I will take my teenaged plug

and connect it to the nearest socket

raping a 85 year old white woman

who is somebody's mother

and as I beat her senseless and set torch to her bed

a greek chorus will be singing in 3/4 time

"Poor thing. She never hurt a soul. What beasts they are."

Audre Geraldine Lorde was a critically acclaimed novelist, poet and essayist. She was born on February 18, 1924 in Harlem and died on November 17, 1992. Her parents were immigrants from Granada who seemed to continually plan to return to the Caribbean throughout most of Lorde's childhood. Lorde recalled that as a child, she spoke in poetry. When she couldn't find existing poems that expressed her feelings, she began to write poems at age twelve or thirteen. She attended Hunter College High School and then supported herself with low paying jobs. Her first lesbian affair was with a coworker at a factory in Bridgeport, Connecticut. She attended the National University of Mexico for a year, starting in 1954. Upon her return, she entered the "gay girl" scene in Greenwich Village but was often the only Black woman in the bars. She recalled that she did not try to build ties to the other three or four Black women in the scene as it seemed to threaten their status as exotic outsiders. She began to study at Hunter College, worked as a librarian, and, of course, wrote poetry. She attempted to join the Harlem Writers Guild but the overt homophobia of the group led her to leave. She received a BA in literature and philosophy from Hunter in 1959 and an MLS from Columbia University in 1960.

Lorde, Audre. "Power." The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde. New York: W.W. Norton & Comapny, Inc., 1997. p. 215-216. Originally published in Between Our Selves. Eidolon, 1976.

Pen and Paper: Les eaux noires

In tribute to the Saints victory at the Super Bowl I dug up this poem I wrote just after Katrina hit.  We must not forget that there are still those who suffer, still those whose lives were forever altered, and still those in need.  I offer this poem as tribute for those lost in the hopes that by remembering them we can prevent ever seeing such devastation and such blatant disregard for the lives of the poor and colored from ever happening again.

Les eaux noires¹


Black water over jazz
my invisible city          hidden skyline       flowing away
into the sea you go.
I am here Mother.
Maman, ne laissant pas votre enfant.²


Mes frères, mon soeurs, ne vont pas.³
Siblings that share the blood of a vanishing mother
You are with the fled, si vous êtes blanc.⁴
But I, ľenfant foncé⁵, am with the forsaken.

Je suis oublié⁶, by all those I love.
Damned to have the sounds of
sidewalks, levees, and waterways flood my ears;
Ľeau remplissant ma bouche, ma gorge, mes poumons.⁷


Black waters over jazz
once blue and foamy white.
Backland waters, darkened
with my floating flesh.
Into the sea I go
because the white waters have filled my mouth
Ainsi personne ne peut m'entendre et me sauver.⁸


Wait for me.
Si vou plait, attente.⁹
______________________________________
¹ The black waters
²  Mommy, don't leave your baby
³  My brothers, my sisters, don't go
⁴  If you are white
⁵  The dark child
⁶  I am forgotten
⁷  Water filling my mouth, my throat, my lungs
⁸  So nobody can hear and save me
⁹  Please, wait.

Echoes: Verse 5, Paul Laurence Dunbar

Longing
by Paul Laurence Dunbar

If you could sit with me beside
     the sea to-day,
And whisper with me sweetest
     dreaming o'er and o'er;
I think I should not find the
     clouds so dim and gray,
And not so loud the waves com-
    plaining at the shore.

If you could sit with me upon the
    shore to-day,
And hold my hand in yours as in
    the days of old,
I think I should not mind the chill
    baptismal spray,
Nor find my hand and heart and
    all the world so cold.

If you could walk with me upon
    the strand to-day,
And tell me that my longing love
    had won your own,
I think all my sad thoughts would
    then be  put away,
And I could give back laughter
    for the Ocean's moan!

Paul Laurence Dunbar (June 27, 1872 - February 9, 1906) was a seminal African-American poet in the late 19th and early 20th century. Dunbar gained national recognition for his 1896 Lyrics of a Lowly Life. Born in Dayton, Ohio to parents who had escaped from slavery, Dunbar died from tuberculosis at 34.

Dunbar, Paul Laurence.  "Longing."  The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar.  Ed. Joanne M. Braxton.  Charlottesville:  Universty of Virginia Press, 1993.  p. 21. 

Echoes: Verse 4, Michael Knoll

Prison Letter
by Michael Knoll

You ask what it's like here
but there are no words for it.
I answer difficult, painful, that man
die hearing their own voices.  That answer
isn't right though and I tell you now
that prison is a room
where a man waits with his nerves
drawn tight as barbed wire, an afternoon
that continues for months, that rises
around his legs like water
until the man is insane
and thinks the afternoon is a lake:
blue water, whitecaps, an island
where he lies under pale sunlight, one
red gardenia growing from his hands --

But that's not right either.  There are no
flowers in these cells, no water
and I hold nothing in my hands
but fear, what lives
in the absence of light, emptying
from my body to fill the large darkness
rising like water up my legs:

It rises and there are no words for it
though I look for them, and turn
on light and watch it
fall like an open yellow shirt
over black water, the light holding
against the dark for just
an instant: against what trembles
in my throat, a particular fear,
a word I have no words for.

       "After spending seven years in prison I wonder if the sameness of life here is so much different from the sameness which (Wallace) Stevens felt, and which fueled his desire to write.  In one of his poems, 'The Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,' Stevens speculated that God and Imagination were one.  He envisioned a central imagination, a kind of room, in which all human beings were connected, a place where the candle of the imaginatin shone over the darkness of separation and discontent.  Here, for Stevens, the 'world imagined' was the 'ultimate good,'...
       As it did for Stevens, writing has given me the power to alter the dimensions of this world, to see beyond the myopia of prison into whatever exists beyond.  My poems, most of them, begin with a concrete, literal imge, and, when they work, expand outward to illuminate the territory of the imagination" 'a brief light in a sky above guntowers.'"  - Michael Knoll, May 1983

Knoll, Michael. "Prison Letter." The Light from Another Country: Poetry from American Prisons. Joseph Bruchac. New York: Greenfield Review Press, 1984. Print.

Definitions of Family

Family.

That word is multi-faceted and the people that I have come to associate with it do not all fit the “traditional” western interpretation of the term. So, I thought now would be a good time to introduce those people who make up my Family.  In the weeks and months to come I am sure each of them will have their stories told  But, for now a simple introduction will serve.

In the beginning....

I suppose I should begin with my grandmother Mecca. As her name implies she is the center of my family and the bond that unites us all. No matter where I am in the world, I can turn to her and feel a sense of peace and calm. That is not to say that Mecca is always tranquil. Sometimes she can be as full of rage and turmoil as any of the rest of us. Her past is full of both beauty and struggle, and the years have brought her greater wisdom, if not greater fortune.

It is from Mecca that Isis was born.  (This is my blog and my rules, so please don't try to come at me with the accuracy of my mythology and geographic history.  Thanks.  The Management).  Isis had it pretty rough growing up.  I will probably do a entire post on her alone, but for now I will stick to the basics.  She was the goddess who controlled all the major forces in my life, but like most gods, that also meant she was usually to busy running shit to intervene directly in my life.  It has only been in the last few years that I have begun to understand the mythos of my mother.  To see her as more than figure.  To recognize her as a person.

I have four siblings: Bigger, Blackbird, Pandora, and Confusion.  The boys are older and the girls are young, which leaves me smack dab in the middle.  I shall introduce them in turn.

The Boys

Bigger like his namesake, grew up filled with a rage he didn't quite understand, and thus was not able to fully control.  And like Bigger, he has wound up behind a set of steel bars.  Blackbird is a a pretty slick cat (mixed metaphor, so what bite me).  Unfortunately, Blackbird never really learned how to fly, mostly because people kept his wings clipped.  He never really had a lot of encouragement to succeed and follow his passions because his interest (b-ball and art) were regulated to pipedreams by my kin.  As he has gotten older though, his feathers have grown out and he has begun to test his wings.

The Girls

Pandora was the center of my world growing up and in a lot of ways still is my touchstone for home.  When she was a little girl, I gladly stepped into the role of big brother and her happiness was synonymous with my own.  Sadly as we have grown older, the kindness in our relationship has been replaced by an animosity and combative energy that I struggle to understand, but find myself helpless to resist.  Confusion is the baby and to be honest most of us don't really know what to do with her.  She is really trying to figure herself out and keeps drawing a blank.  I know in the end she will find her way, but in the meantime I worry.

(Side note, both Blackbird and Confusion are really my half cousins, but they were informally adopted by Isis.  Confused yet?)

This is where things get more interesting, because like most members of Negrocity (Negro Society), I entertain a host of play siblings and cousins.  If you don't know what a "play cousin" is here is urban dictionary for you.

1. play cousin
n. someone who you growed up around, who you know like family but ain't related to yaz.

These are my closest friends and confidants and they make up my High Council.

The High Council

I never really thought about it until now, but the Council is pretty much made up of women.  My little band of Amazonians, who give me advice on life.  The High Council is really governed for the most part by Peaches, Black Laces, Bella Bilar, Pinay,  Tigress, Eb, and Profesora.  I met Peaches, Black Laces, and Bella Bilar in my college days and they were a large part of how I made it through.  I really don't see them as much as I would like and have been working on visiting more frequently and I am sure that they are about ready to kick my ass for my negligence.  Pinay, Tigress,  Eb, and Profesora have known me since my Cali days and I can still turn to them to remember the old days and to share in the shit I find myself in now.

There are a handful of others who sometimes attend meetings of the High Council and there are definitely a few new editions that I think will be nominated for lifetime appointments (Pixie and Bubbles for example).  There are also three guys who have been voting members of the High Council from time to time: Waru (The Lost One), Puck (The Betrayer), and Apollo (The Fallen).

So these are my people. The ones who keep me going in more ways than they could possibly imagine.

My Family.

Echoes: Verse 3, Don Charles

Comfort
by Don Charles

When you looked and
          saw my Brown skin
Didn't it make you
         feel uncomfortable?

Didn't you remember that
         old blanket
You used to wrap up in
         when the nights go cold?

Didn't you think about that
         maplewood table
Where you used to sit and
         write letter to your daddy?

Didn't you almost taste that
         sweet gingerbread
Your granny used to make?
         (And you know it was good.)

When you looked and
         saw my Brown eyes
Didn't they look just like
        home?

Don Charles, twenty-nine (at the time this poem was published), lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where he was born and raised.  "My poetry reflects my personal experience as an unemployed gay black man trying to survive in a hostile society.  I'm sexually attracted to other men of color, and not ashamed to say so."

Charles, Don. "Comfort." Brother to Brother: New Writings By Black Gay Men. 1991. Essex Hemphill. Washington: Red Bone Press, 1991. Print.

Pen and Paper: Tryst and Open Letter

Here are two poems on love.  (Valentine's Day is coming up, so give me a break, lol). They sit in balance to one and other I think.  Please leave you're comments (good or bad).  Or better yet, write a poem in response.
_____________________________________________

Tryst

To be held and behold
in the grasp of hands
The floodgates of human desire
unnamed and unmanned
souls burning like cold embers
on the hearth
a breathe away from the flare of
recognition
left to sputter at the futility of
unrealized dreams and half
whispered thoughts,
the sweetest of
lies,  manifest sorrow that words
only begin to encompass
guilt and regret fail
to reflect
the pain of this moment before
illusion gives way to truth
when fond dreams are burned by
first lights fire
fast consumed by the present pressure
for release
an end to delusions of
self and others
and like infinity i move on
only to my beginning
and the ending
of a tryst
that should have never been

_________________________________________

Open Letter

Dear       ,

I sit here waiting
Always waiting
Waiting for the moment you return
With open arms and lips
Waiting
For
Mingled thoughts and tongues
That speak a language
Only two understand
Me
Waiting
For something that exists
Only
In thoughts
I sit
Waiting

With all my heart,