Yusef Komunyakaa

No, sweetheart, I said courtly love. I was thinking of John Donne's "Yet this enjoys before it woo," but my big hands were dreaming Pinetop's boogie-woogie piano taking the ubiquitous night apart. Not Courtney. I know "inflated tear" means worlds approaching pain & colliding, or a heavenly body calling to darkness, & that shame has never been my truest garment, because I was born afraid of needles. But I've been shoved up against frayed ropes too, & I had to learn to bob & weave, to duck & hook, till I could jab my way out of a foregone conclusion, till blues reddened a room. All I know is, sometimes a man wants only a hug when something two-steps him toward a little makeshift stage. Somehow, between hellhounds & a guitar solo made of gutstring & wood, I outlived a stormy night with snow on my eyelids.

Somebody go & ask Biggie to orate what's going down in the streets. No, an attitude is not a suicide note written on walls around the streets. Twitter stays lockstep in the frontal lobe as we hope for a bypass beyond the streets, but only each day bears witness in the echo chamber of the streets. Grandmaster Flash's thunderclap says he's not the grand jury in the streets, says he doesn't care if you're big or small fear can kill a man on the streets. Take back the night. Take killjoy's cameras & microphones to the streets. If you're holding the hand lightning strikes juice will light you up miles from the streets where an electric chair surge dims all the county lights beyond the streets. Who will go out there & speak laws of motion & relativity in the streets? Yusef, this morning proves a crow the only truth serum in the street.

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations My black face fades, hiding inside the black granite. I said I wouldn't dammit: No tears. I'm stone. I'm flesh. My clouded reflection eyes me like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning. I turn this way—the stone lets me go. I turn that way—I'm inside the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Vietnam Veterans Memorial Located in Washington D.C., the Memorial is roughly 500 feet wide, and the names of soldiers who died in Vietnam are etched on its black granite walls. For more information and photos, visit The Wall-USA . again, depending on the light to make a difference. I go down the 58,022 names 58,022 names The number of names of dead soldiers etched on the wall at the time of Komunyakaa’s composing of this poem. As of 2009, there are now 58,261 names listed on the Memorial, of which, approximately 1,200 are listed as missing in action (MIAs) or prisoners of war (POWs). , half-expecting to find my own in letters like smoke. I touch the name Andrew Johnson Andrew Johnson A soldier from the poet’s hometown of Bogalusa, Louisiana; also the name of 17th U.S. president (1865-69), who succeeded Lincoln and denied freed slaves equal protection under the law by vetoing the Civil Rights Bill and the Freedman’s Bureau Bill in 1866. ; I see the booby trap's white flash. Names shimmer on a woman's blouse but when she walks away the names stay on the wall. Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's wings cutting across my stare. The sky. A plane in the sky. A white vet's image floats closer to me, then his pale eyes look through mine. I'm a window. He's lost his right arm inside the stone. In the black mirror a woman’s trying to erase names: No, she's brushing a boy's hair.

I’ve come to this one grassy hill in Ramallah, off Tokyo Street, to place a few red anemones & a sheaf of wheat on Darwish’s grave. A borrowed line transported me beneath a Babylonian moon & I found myself lucky to have the shadow of a coat as warmth, listening to a poet’s song of Jerusalem, the hum of a red string Caesar stole off Gilgamesh’s lute. I know a prison of sunlight on the skin. The land I come from they also dreamt before they arrived in towering ships battered by the hard Atlantic winds. Crows followed me from my home. My coyote heart is an old runagate redskin, a noble savage, still Lakota, & I knew the bow before the arch. I feel the wildflowers, all the grasses & insects singing to me. My sacred dead is the dust of restless plains I come from, & I love when it gets into my eyes & mouth telling me of the roads behind & ahead. I go back to broken treaties & smallpox, the irony of barbed wire. Your envoy could be a reprobate whose inheritance is no more than a swig of firewater. The sun made a temple of the bones of my tribe. I know a dried-up riverbed & extinct animals live in your nightmares sharp as shark teeth from my mountains strung into this brave necklace around my neck. I hear Chief Standing Bear saying to Judge Dundy, “I am a man,” & now I know why I’d rather die a poet than a warrior, tattoo & tomahawk.

I've come to this one grassy hill in Ramallah, off Tokyo Street, to a place a few red anemones & a sheaf of wheat on Darwish's grave. A borrowed line transported me beneath a Babylonian moon & I found myself lucky to have the shadow of a coat as warmth, listening to a poet's song of Jerusalem, the hum of a red string Caesar stole off Gilgamesh's lute. I know a prison of sunlight on the skin. The land I come from they also dreamt before they arrived in towering ships battered by the hard Atlantic winds. Crows followed me from my home. My coyote heart is an old runagate redskin, a noble savage, still Lakota, & I knew the bow before the arch. I feel the wildflowers, all the grasses & insects singing to me. My sacred dead is the dust of restless plains I come from, & I love when it gets into my eyes & mouth telling me of the roads behind & ahead. I go back to broken treaties & smallpox, the irony of barbed wire. Your envoy could be a reprobate whose inheritance is no more than a swig of firewater. The sun made a temple of the bones of my tribe. I know a dried-up riverbed & extinct animals live in your nightmares sharp as shark teeth from my mountains strung into this brave necklace around my neck. I hear Chief Standing Bear saying to Judge Dundy, "I am a man," & now I know why I'd rather die a poet than a warrior, tattoo & tomahawk.

When I was a boy, he says, the sky began burning, & someone ran knocking on our door one night. The house became birds in the eaves too low for a boy's ears. I heard a girl talking, but they weren't words. I knew one good thing: a girl was somewhere in our house, speaking slow as a sailor's parrot. I glimpsed Alice in Wonderland. Her voice smelled like an orange, though I'd never peeled an orange. I knocked on the walls, in a circle. The voice was almost America. My ears plucked a word out of the air. She said, Friend. I eased open the door hidden behind overcoats in a closet. The young woman was smiling at me. She was teaching herself a language to take her far, far away, & she taught me a word each day to keep secret. But one night I woke to other voices in the house. A commotion downstairs & a pleading. There are promises made at night that turn into stones at daybreak. From my window, I saw the stars burning in the river brighter than a big celebration. I waited for her return, with my hands over my mouth. I can't say her name, because it was dangerous in our house so close to the water. Was she a boy's make-believe friend or a beehive breathing inside the walls? Years later my aunts said two German soldiers shot the girl one night beside the Vistula. This is how I learned your language. It was long ago. It was springtime.

They work fingers to bone & borrow smudged paper, then make promises to family, unmerciful gods, the unborn. Some eat a favorite meal three times in a row. Others partake only a pinch of soil before boarding half-broken boats & rubber rafts — half of the young women big with life inside them, flesh & blood for daydreams of the Arabian nights, as makeshift charts & constellations work their way through war & rumors of war. The smugglers count their loot. Hard winds rattle gongs over sea salt till the rusty engines die, & cries alert mermaid sirens as pirated schooners adrift under a mute sky rock to & fro, & the fight goes out of the few alive. Their loved ones & friends, lost folk songs, mountains & valleys, all left behind. Searchlights spot the dead hugging the living, & draglines raise only those who were braver than us. The lucky ones stumble out of stupor, tried by raging water beneath black skies, listening to the albatross talk.

The city at 3 a.m. is an ungodly mask the approaching day hides behind & from, the coyote nosing forth, the muscles of something ahead, & a fiery blaze of eighteen-wheelers zoom out of the curved night trees, along the rim of absolute chance. A question hangs in the oily air. She knows he will follow her scent left in the poisoned grass & buzz of chainsaws, if he can unweave a circle of traps around the subdivision. For a breathy moment, she stops on the world’s edge, & then quick as that masters the stars & again slips the noose & darts straight between sedans & SUVs. Don’t try to hide from her kind of blues or the dead nomads who walked trails now paved by wanderlust, an epoch somewhere between tamed & wild. If it were Monday instead of Sunday the outcome may be different, but she’s now in Central Park searching for a Seneca village among painted stones & shrubs, where she’s never been, & lucky she hasn’t forgotten how to jig & kill her way home.

I’ve been here before, dreaming myself backwards, among grappling hooks of light. True to the seasons, I’ve lived every word spoken. Did I walk into someone’s nightmare? Hunger quivers on a fleshly string at the crossroad. So deep is the lore, there’s only tomorrow today where darkness splinters & wounds the bird of paradise. On paths that plunge into primordial green, Echo’s laughter finds us together. In the sweatshops of desire men think if they don’t die the moon won’t rise. All the dead-end streets run into one moment of bliss & sleight of hand. Beside the Euphrates, past the Tigris, up the Mississippi. Bloodline & clockwork. The X drawn where we stand. Trains follow rivers that curve around us. The distant night opens like a pearl fan, a skirt, a heart, a drop of salt. When we embrace, we are not an island beyond fables & the blue exhaust of commerce. When the sounds of River Styx punish trees, my effigy speaks to the night owl. Our voices break open the pink magnolia where struggle is home to the beast in us. All the senses tuned for the Hawkesbury, labyrinths turning into lowland fog. Hand in hand, feeling good, we walk phantoms from the floating machine. When a drowning man calls out, his voice follows him downstream.

We tied branches to our helmets. We painted our faces & rifles with mud from a riverbank, blades of grass hung from the pockets of our tiger suits. We wove ourselves into the terrain, content to be a hummingbird’s target. We hugged bamboo & leaned against a breeze off the river, slow-dragging with ghosts from Saigon to Bangkok, with women left in doorways reaching in from America. We aimed at dark-hearted songbirds. In our way station of shadows rock apes tried to blow our cover, throwing stones at the sunset. Chameleons crawled our spines, changing from day to night: green to gold, gold to black. But we waited till the moon touched metal, till something almost broke inside us. VC struggled with the hillside, like black silk wrestling iron through grass. We weren’t there. The river ran through our bones. Small animals took refuge against our bodies; we held our breath, ready to spring the L-shaped ambush, as a world revolved under each man’s eyelid.