194 Racism and discrimination poems

They put me in a dead boy’s clothes dead Joseph Except he wasn’t dead at first they put Me in his clothes dead Joseph’s     after Joseph Died and I used to call him Joe     they put Me in   Joe’s clothes at first before he died Joe wasn’t five yet when I met him      I Was seven     I was seven when he died Still but a whole year bigger then but I Wore his clothes still and the whole year I lived with Momma Varina      and with daddy Jeff I never lived so good as when I lived with Them and especially it was daddy Jeff Who kept me fed and wearing those nice clothes Until they fit as tight as bandages

there was a remember when the mama was my girl the mama was in my girl biding to turn my girl turn mama when what I got turn to girl in her my girl in my girl make my girl mama they both mine all three I remember a when when I only dreamed dreams but my dreams are remembers now they a when that when was when the girl I made of mama I made a mama with what I got I tell what I tell but I know what I know only a man make his dream a remember and ain’t I a man what’s mine is mine to turn to what I dream what I make mine to make mine I won’t ’bide what won’t turn

A State which, in the epoch of race poisoning, dedicates itself to the cherishing of its best racial elements, must some day be master of the world. —Mein  Kampf I The veldt men pray Carved wood and stone And tear their flesh To vein and bone. The idols scowl In the brassy sun Unmindful of Appeasement done. Yea, warriors cringe, Whose tauntings dare The regnant brute In regal lair. As tribal gods The brave confound, They bruise their heads Against the ground. Kennings of death Encyst the square, The mourners drool And children scare. Hyena laughs Spear to the stars, Dark bodies fall Like ruptured spars. Witch doctors whine Edicts anew And saint their mugs Of chloral brew. Fear grapples fear, Crinkles the knife: And life is death And death is life. And he who dies Bequeaths the chief His herd and flock, But not his grief. Who dares to mock, Who dares to shove The idols folk Are schooled to love? And graybeards croak One fool alone Reviled the hakims Of wood and stone: And headmen staked The wretch to die From dooms that crawl And dooms that fly. Ages fag out In cyclic nights, But sire and son Repeat the rites. II The rule-or-ruin class, in idols of the tribe, Creates narcissine images of itself; Defend its fetishes from the merest gibe, Like iron captains of the Guelf. The black-veldt god Behold, hair kinked and flat, Against the sun’s needling myriapod A cooling mat. The low wide nostrils ventilate The long head in the incandescent air. Insufferable sunrays cannot penetrate Black tissues as the fair. The python arm with reach to spare Are at the beck of tribal law: The black-veldt god is not aware Of civilizations buried in the jungle’s maw. The yellow god Behold, his mongoloid eye fold, The color of his sod. The cheekbones arched and bold, The broad index of face, The stoic mold Herald the myth of race. Lulled by the incense wisdom of repose, Millenniums of candlelight, The vegetarian god turns up his nose At odors of the carnivorous white. The Nordic god Behold, his blue-gray eyes Far-famed to conquer with a single prod A people mazed in a hinterland of whys. Hairy as the ape, of lip as thin, With Mongol, one in blood, with African, He makes a pseudo-science of his skin And writes his autobiography Superman. Race biases sow Hemlocks to maim and blind, Pile up Sinais of woe, Jettison the freedoms of mind, Breed the hydras of stealth, Set kind razeeing kind, Convert to potter’s fields the commonwealth. Drink, O Fool, the bias of the tribe, Autograph the epitaph of pain, Press to the heart the fangs of the moccasin bribe, Rape beauty’s flesh behind the crib of grain, Let dust bowls blight the soul’s topography, Eat, O Fool, the racist shibboleth— Damn the soul to sodomy! Damn the soul to death! III How many times Does a Southern town Waste white genius To keep the Blacks down? How many times Does progress stop To find the maimed A mythical prop? How many times Do a Führer’s claws Dig up dry bones Of the gray Lost Cause? How many times Does the ermine class Throw scraps of hate To the starved white mass? Five roads, the spokes of a county wheel, Mortise the hub of our Courthouse Square: Our graybeards fable our Daniel Boone, Who brothered the red chiefs where Five dark and bloody frontier paths, Crossbones old as the skull of the moon, Witnessed the sacrament pipe of peace, Grim as the grin of a dead buffoon. Gone are scalping-knives, Gone are red frontiers, Gone are homeborn chiefs, Gone are pioneers. Yet the town Five Points Worships myths of race; Like the veldt men, hates Alien norm and face. Sky the Jim Crow sign, Dam the ghetto’s wrath, Gibbet freedom’s sons— Tell it not in Gath! Out of the burial-crags of night The felon winds hawk down; Their devil claws riprap the roofs That visor the town. The stores on Main Street lean, Tome to mummy tome; The houses squat like smoking hulls Half-convexed on a shoal of foam, And glowworm windows in the deaf-dumb streets Are greeting cards of home. Idols of the tribe Jail the spirit fast. Scorn of lesser breeds Flash and bone outlast. Vandal Z’s of wind, Beggar vale and hill, As the myths of race Loot the people’s will. Upon the courthouse Justice stands, Eyes fated not to see; The town clock christens now the first-born hour Of a day of hate to be. Nor man nor beast prowls in his world, But on the Courthouse Square A statue of the Lost Cause bayonets Contemporary air. The skull and bones Of yesterday Haunts those who travel The American Way. Nobler to grope In the dusk of dawn Than to stumble back In midnight’s spawn. Mein Kampf is not A bible writ With hand of gore And heart of grit. Mein Kampf is lepra That whores the soul, And the brothels of race Nordic bawds control. Yet thunderbolt hells Of chastening rods Smite ever Gomorrahs Of tribal gods!

If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursèd lot. If we must die, O let us nobly die, So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead! O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe! Though far outnumbered let us show us brave, And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow! What though before us lies the open grave? Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

Perhaps, this morning, we’re there, normal and soon forgotten, as news is when it’s passed over breakfast, like love, something that’s always cast, too heavy to hold for long. We breathe it in, the bacon, the coffee. We listen to the little quavers as the local tongues, water over rock, rise and fall, like stones skipping soft into the white that smoothed them. The women speak like grandmothers, softly opening their mouths, opening and drawing advice from themselves, like biscuits, and offering in kindness a little more than anyone could ask, more than anyone can take. I know their pitying. It looks like patience, the look on everyone’s faces as the peddler shuffles in his blindness, black hand held open, everyone awaiting the hiss of door, the whisper in everyone’s throats, breaking from patience into pleasure.

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

He came back and shot. He shot him. When he came back, he shot, and he fell, stumbling, past the shadow wood, down, shot, dying, dead, to full halt. At the bottom, bleeding, shot dead. He died then, there after the fall, the speeding bullet, tore his face and blood sprayed fine over the killer and the grey light. Pictures of the dead man, are everywhere. And his spirit sucks up the light. But he died in darkness darker than his soul and everything tumbled blindly with him dying down the stairs. We have no word on the killer, except he came back, from somewhere to do what he did. And shot only once into his victim's stare, and left him quickly when the blood ran out. We know the killer was skillful, quick, and silent, and that the victim probably knew him. Other than that, aside from the caked sourness of the dead man's expression, and the cool surprise in the fixture of his hands and fingers, we know nothing.

Home’s the place we head for in our sleep. Boxcars stumbling north in dreams don’t wait for us. We catch them on the run. The rails, old lacerations that we love, shoot parallel across the face and break just under Turtle Mountains. Riding scars you can’t get lost. Home is the place they cross. The lame guard strikes a match and makes the dark less tolerant. We watch through cracks in boards as the land starts rolling, rolling till it hurts to be here, cold in regulation clothes. We know the sheriff’s waiting at midrun to take us back. His car is dumb and warm. The highway doesn’t rock, it only hums like a wing of long insults. The worn-down welts of ancient punishments lead back and forth. All runaways wear dresses, long green ones, the color you would think shame was. We scrub the sidewalks down because it's shameful work. Our brushes cut the stone in watered arcs and in the soak frail outlines shiver clear a moment, things us kids pressed on the dark face before it hardened, pale, remembering delicate old injuries, the spines of names and leaves.

Now begins the festival and rivalry of late fall, the weird debauch and daring debacle of frat-boy parties as students parade foggy streets in mock processions, bearing on shoulders scrawny effigies of dead, defeated Indians cut from trees, where, in the twilight, they had earlier been hung. "Just dummies," laughs our dad, "Red Indians hung or burned—it's only in jest." Every fall brings the Big Game against Stanford, where young scholars let off steam before the debacle they may face of failed exams. "You're dead wrong," he says to Mom. "They don't mock real, live Indians." Around UC campus, mock lynchings go on. Beneath porches we see hung the scarecrow Natives with fake long braids, dead from the merrymaking. On Bancroft Way, one has fallen indecorously to a lawn, a symbol of the debacle that happened three generations ago in California's hills, where Native peoples were strung up. (A way of having fun? Where did they go, those Indian ghosts?) "Their kids perform mock war dances, whooping, re-enacting scenes of a debacle white folks let loose," chides Mom. "Meanwhile we hang portraits of presidents on school walls and never let fall the old red, white, and blue. My dear brother is dead because he fought in a White man's war. How many dead Indians do they need to feel okay? This whole thing wears on my soul." In the dark car we go silent, and the fall night gets chillier. In yards, blazing bonfires mock the stars that glow palely somewhere above. A thin moon hangs over the tule fogs. I've never heard the word "debacle” before and wonder what it means. "What's a debacle, Mom? " I ask. "Oh, honey, it's a terrible and deadly collapse. Complete ruin." I've noticed how the hung Indians have their heads slumped forward. They wear old clothes, headbands with feathers, face paint, moc- casins instead of boots. Little do we know, this fall, living Indians at Feather Falls leave tobacco to mark that, indeed, we're still here, lungs full of indigenous air.

By nature Indians are very lazy and sworn enemies of work. They prefer to suffer hunger than to fatigue themselves with agriculture. Therefore, they must be forced to do this by their superiors. With six industrious Europeans one can do more in one day than fifty Indians —Joseph Och , Missionary in Sonora: Travel Reports of Joseph Och, S.J., 1755-1767 Mining: The Indian is naked, swinging quarter to half hundredweight steel-edged crowbars. He climbs beams with notches set step by step, carrying ore in plaited baskets on his shoulders. They are given one half-bushel of maize per week. This is their payment unless they have a family– then they are given two half-bushels. Two men using a wheelbarrow could haul out more than can thirty lazy Indians working an entire day.