506 History and politics poems

Dedicated to Kwame Nkrumah I was a little boy, at home with strangers. I liked my playmates, and knew well, Whence all their parents came; From England, Scotland, royal France From Germany and oft by chance The humble Emerald Isle. But my brown skin and close-curled hair Was alien, and how it grew, none knew; Few tried to say, some dropped a wonderful word or stray; Some laughed and stared. And then it came: I dreamed. I placed together all I knew All hints and slurs together drew. I dreamed. I made one picture of what nothing seemed I shuddered in dumb terror In silence screamed, For now it seemed this I had dreamed; How up from Hell, a land had leaped A wretched land, all scorched and seamed Covered with ashes, chained with pain Streaming with blood, in horror lain Its very air a shriek of death And agony of hurt. Anon I woke, but in one corner of my soul I stayed asleep. Forget I could not, But never would I remember That hell-hoist ghost Of slavery and woe. I lived and grew, I worked and hoped I planned and wandered, gripped and coped With every doubt but one that slept Yet clamoured to awaken. I became old; old, worn and gray; Along my hard and weary way Rolled war and pestilence, war again; I looked on Poverty and foul Disease I walked with Death and yet I knew There stirred a doubt: Were all dreams true? And what in truth was Africa? One cloud-swept day a Seer appeared, All closed and veiled as me he hailed And bid me make three journeys to the world Seeking all through their lengthened links The endless Riddle of the Sphinx. I went to Moscow; Ignorance grown wise taught me Wisdom; I went to Peking: Poverty grown rich Showed me the wealth of Work I came to Accra. Here at last, I looked back on my Dream; I heard the Voice that loosed The Long-looked dungeons of my soul I sensed that Africa had come Not up from Hell, but from the sum of Heaven’s glory. I lifted up mine eyes to Ghana And swept the hills with high Hosanna; Above the sun my sight took flight Till from that pinnacle of light I saw dropped down this earth of crimson, green and gold Roaring with color, drums and song. Happy with dreams and deeds worth more than doing Around me velvet faces loomed Burnt by the kiss of everlasting suns Under great stars of midnight glory Trees danced, and foliage sang; The lilies hallelujah rang Where robed with rule on Golden Stool The gold-crowned Priests with duty done Pour high libations to the sun And danced to gods. Red blood flowed rare ’neath close-clung hair While subtle perfume filled the air And whirls and whirls of tiny curls Crowned heads. Yet Ghana shows its might and power Not in its color nor its flower But in its wondrous breadth of soul Its Joy of Life Its selfless role Of giving. School and clinic, home and hall Road and garden bloom and call Socialism blossoms bold On Communism centuries old. I lifted my last voice and cried I cried to heaven as I died: O turn me to the Golden Horde Summon all western nations Toward the Rising Sun. From reeking West whose day is done, Who stink and stagger in their dung Toward Africa, China, India’s strand Where Kenya and Himalaya stand And Nile and Yang-tze roll: Turn every yearning face of man. Come with us, dark America: The scum of Europe battened here And drowned a dream Made fetid swamp a refuge seem: Enslaved the Black and killed the Red And armed the Rich to loot the Dead; Worshipped the whores of Hollywood Where once the Virgin Mary stood And lynched the Christ. Awake, awake, O sleeping world Honor the sun; Worship the stars, those vaster suns Who rule the night Where black is bright And all unselfish work is right And Greed is Sin. And Africa leads on: Pan Africa!

Two hundred seventy Ghost Dancers died dreaming That humanity would drown In a flood of White sins. Then the renewed earth Would reclaim city and town, Leaving only Ghost Dancers And those who lived by nature’s laws. History books say the threat is gone. The Ghost Dance died with the ancestors— Wovoka and his sacred dream Were destroyed. Each time it rains, I go out to the sidewalk, Where the tree roots Have broken the concrete Listening to the water’s whispering: “It is coming soon.”

It's all in a day's work   the door from Life to Death Muhammed Ali comes in one door   and Russ Meyer comes in t' uther     While Ali Stages a CONFAB at 11.00 AM but doesn't show all the cameras and tape-recorders are left With their tongues hanging out in the heat Under the veranda I just recoveredd from food-poisoning & look up AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND SHAKE HANDS How'd you doo It is prophetic I meet a child born at the same hour and day as my oldest child I learn   your Anglo   grandfather became the ArchArchimandrite Of Alexandria “for all the Greeks downunder” MOHAMMED ALI GIVES his speech finally “On the Intoxications OF LIFE” (That's for Real, Folks) and tells one girl sitting up near the stage to pull her dress down because it was “showing” above her knee   That's it it's all Over wham boom! Now Russ MEYER must be the “greatest” genius of America (?) His “genius” lies   in that he is the only one to successfully make blood spurt from a victim on the silver screen like a slide trombone carying a hilarious note .... So many things have happened   The People's Liberation Army has seized the Israeli Ambassador ('Ray'.)   Bedford- Stuyvesant exploded again   (I wonder what's happening on Killens' block?)   and lava has overflowed on  (Mt) Aetna (again) Can't keep upt with it all This Hermaphrodite   running up and down the stairs with a sword   Hey! The doors slam open  the crowds emerge Like an age ashamed of itself Like an elephant with a  caulifflower ear      Some are doing A St. Vitus dance and shooting fireworks out of cactus-launchers You come toward me like a diffident haystack I'm talking to you all the time you pretend not to hear me You're with your two pals   (One of them the “returned” of the Boogey Woogies)   the road parts us   like a part in the hair of the whole Earth   and splits me with it The stars make a sound like a tuning-folk Maybe I'm learning anew lanaguage to speak a newlanguage Maybe What is this   Cult of the Fedora hat and the jalopy of the heart Rose of Lima   Unbeliever that I am  I believe in you so much “Plebiscite”              “Dolores” .... “Quitting Time” Washerwomen in the elephant grass   're listening Once again I come upon an evening 5,000 mi. away from (New York) the mirage of “The City” become so obsessive I see Skyscrapers appear moving through the fog on horses' legs! “With no interjection...,oh?” New York  my poems are always an elegy to you The horses see me coming the horses smell the sunset wing Zapata...in whiteshadow still rides on it Gold-club-headed exorcized Jewish demons happily hopping backwards May 25, 1971 2405 Alpine Road, Ca.

The land was ours before we were the land’s. She was our land more than a hundred years Before we were her people. She was ours In Massachusetts, in Virginia, But we were England’s, still colonials, Possessing what we still were unpossessed by, Possessed by what we now no more possessed. Something we were withholding made us weak Until we found out that it was ourselves We were withholding from our land of living, And forthwith found salvation in surrender. Such as we were we gave ourselves outright (The deed of gift was many deeds of war) To the land vaguely realizing westward, But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, Such as she was, such as she would become.

The glories of our blood and state Are shadows, not substantial things; There is no armour against Fate; Death lays his icy hand on kings: Sceptre and Crown Must tumble down, And in the dust be equal made With the poor crooked scythe and spade. Some men with swords may reap the field, And plant fresh laurels where they kill: But their strong nerves at last must yield; They tame but one another still: Early or late They stoop to fate, And must give up their murmuring breath When they, pale captives, creep to death. The garlands wither on your brow; Then boast no more your mighty deeds! Upon Death's purple altar now See where the victor-victim bleeds. Your heads must come To the cold tomb: Only the actions of the just Smell sweet and blossom in their dust.

King Francis was a hearty king, and loved a royal sport, And one day as his lions fought, sat looking on the court; The nobles filled the benches, and the ladies in their pride, And 'mongst them sat the Count de Lorge, with one for whom he sighed: And truly 'twas a gallant thing to see that crowning show, Valour and love, and a king above, and the royal beasts below. Ramped and roared the lions, with horrid laughing jaws; They bit, they glared, gave blows like beams, a wind went with their paws; With wallowing might and stifled roar they rolled on one another; Till all the pit with sand and mane was in a thunderous smother; The bloody foam above the bars came whisking through the air; Said Francis then, "Faith, gentlemen, we're better here than there." De Lorge's love o'erheard the King, a beauteous lively dame With smiling lips and sharp bright eyes, which always seemed the same; She thought, the Count my lover is brave as brave can be; He surely would do wondrous things to show his love of me; King, ladies, lovers, all look on; the occasion is divine; I'll drop my glove, to prove his love; great glory will be mine. She dropped her glove, to prove his love, then looked at him and smiled; He bowed, and in a moment leaped among the lions wild: The leap was quick, return was quick, he has regained his place, Then threw the glove, but not with love, right in the lady's face. "By God!" said Francis, "rightly done!" and he rose from where he sat: "No love," quoth he, "but vanity, sets love a task like that."

is thought to be a confession, won by endless torture, but which our interrogators must hate to record—all those old code names, dates, the standard narrative of sandpaper throats, even its remorse, fall ignored. Far away, a late (not lost) messenger stares, struck by window bargains or is it the gift of a sudden solicitude: is she going to lift up her shadow’s weight, shift hers onto it? She knows who bears whom. In that momentary museum where memory occurs more accrue of those torturers’ pincers than lessened fingernails, eyes teased to a pulp, we beg for closeups.Ormolus, objets d’art! A satyr drains an hourglass with one gulp.

Tomb of a millionaire, A multi-millionaire, ladies and gentlemen, Place of the dead where they spend every year The usury of twenty-five thousand dollars For upkeep and flowers To keep fresh the memory of the dead. The merchant prince gone to dust Commanded in his written will Over the signed name of his last testament Twenty-five thousand dollars be set aside For roses, lilacs, hydrangeas, tulips, For perfume and color, sweetness of remembrance Around his last long home. (A hundred cash girls want nickels to go to the movies to-night. In the back stalls of a hundred saloons, women are at tables Drinking with men or waiting for men jingling loose silver dollars in their pockets. In a hundred furnished rooms is a girl who sells silk or dress goods or leather stuff for six dollars a week wages And when she pulls on her stockings in the morning she is reckless about God and the newspapers and the police, the talk of her home town or the name people call her.)

Is there, for honest poverty, That hings his head, an' a' that? The coward slave, we pass him by, We dare be poor for a' that! For a' that, an' a' that, Our toils obscure, an' a' that; The rank is but the guinea's stamp; The man's the gowd for a' that, What tho' on hamely fare we dine, Wear hoddin-gray, an' a' that; Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine, A man's a man for a' that. For a' that, an' a' that, Their tinsel show an' a' that; The honest man, tho' e'er sae poor, Is king o' men for a' that. Ye see yon birkie, ca'd a lord Wha struts, an' stares, an' a' that; Tho' hundreds worship at his word, He's but a coof for a' that: For a' that, an' a' that, His riband, star, an' a' that, The man o' independent mind, He looks and laughs at a' that. A prince can mak a belted knight, A marquis, duke, an' a' that; But an honest man's aboon his might, Guid faith he mauna fa' that! For a' that, an' a' that, Their dignities, an' a' that, The pith o' sense, an' pride o' worth, Are higher rank than a' that. Then let us pray that come it may, As come it will for a' that, That sense and worth, o'er a' the earth, May bear the gree, an' a' that. For a' that, an' a' that, It's coming yet, for a' that, That man to man, the warld o'er, Shall brothers be for a' that.

The old South Boston Aquarium stands in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded. The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales. The airy tanks are dry. Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass; my hand tingled to burst the bubbles drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish. My hand draws back. I often sigh still for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom of the fish and reptile. One morning last March, I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage, yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting as they cropped up tons of mush and grass to gouge their underworld garage. Parking spaces luxuriate like civic sandpiles in the heart of Boston. A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders braces the tingling Statehouse, shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief, propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake. Two months after marching through Boston, half the regiment was dead; at the dedication, William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe. Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city's throat. Its Colonel is as lean as a compass-needle. He has an angry wrenlike vigilance, a greyhound's gentle tautness; he seems to wince at pleasure, and suffocate for privacy. He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely, peculiar power to choose life and die— when he leads his black soldiers to death, he cannot bend his back. On a thousand small town New England greens, the old white churches hold their air of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic. The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier grow slimmer and younger each year— wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets and muse through their sideburns . . . Shaw's father wanted no monument except the ditch, where his son's body was thrown and lost with his "niggers." The ditch is nearer. There are no statues for the last war here; on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph shows Hiroshima boiling over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages" that survived the blast. Space is nearer. When I crouch to my television set, the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons. Colonel Shaw is riding on his bubble, he waits for the blessèd break. The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere, giant finned cars nose forward like fish; a savage servility slides by on grease.