194 Racism and discrimination poems

All you violated ones with gentle hearts; You violent dreamers whose cries shout heartbreak; Whose voices echo clamors of our cool capers, And whose black faces have hollowed pits for eyes. All you gambling sons and hooked children and bowery bums Hating white devils and black bourgeoisie, Thumbing your noses at your burning red suns, Gather round this coffin and mourn your dying swan. Snow-white moslem head-dress around a dead black face! Beautiful were your sand-papering words against our skins! Our blood and water pour from your flowing wounds. You have cut open our breasts and dug scalpels in our brains. When and Where will another come to take your holy place? Old man mumbling in his dotage, crying child, unborn?

For my people everywhere singing their slave songs repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an unseen power; For my people lending their strength to the years, to the gone years and the now years and the maybe years, washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching dragging along never gaining never reaping never knowing and never understanding; For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama backyards playing baptizing and preaching and doctor and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking and playhouse and concert and store and hair and Miss Choomby and company; For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn to know the reasons why and the answers to and the people who and the places where and the days when, in memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we were black and poor and small and different and nobody cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood; For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing and play and drink their wine and religion and success, to marry their playmates and bear children and then die of consumption and anemia and lynching; For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy people filling the cabarets and taverns and other people’s pockets and needing bread and shoes and milk and land and money and something—something all our own; For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackled and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures who tower over us omnisciently and laugh; For my people blundering and groping and floundering in the dark of churches and schools and clubs and societies, associations and councils and committees and conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches, preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by false prophet and holy believer; For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding, trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people, all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations; Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth; let a people loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now rise and take control.

Darlings, if your owners say you are /not usually like this/ then I must take them / at their word / I am like you / not crazy about that which towers before me / particularly the buildings here / and the people inside / who look at my name / and make noises / that seem like growling / my small and eager darlings / what it must be like / to have the sound for love / and the sound for fear / be a matter of pitch / I am afraid to touch / anyone who might stay / long enough to make leaving / an echo / there is a difference / between burying a thing you love / for the sake of returning / and leaving a fresh absence / in a city’s dirt / looking for a mercy / left by someone / who came before you / I am saying that I / too / am at a loss for language / can’t beg myself / a doorway / out of anyone / I am not usually like this either / I must apologize again for how adulthood has rendered me / us, really 
/ I know you all forget the touch / of someone who loves you / in two minutes / and I arrive to you / a constellation of shadows / once hands / listen darlings / there is a sky / to be pulled down / into our bowls / there is a sweetness for us / to push our faces into / I promise / I will not beg for you to stay this time / I will leave you to your wild galloping / I am sorry / to hold you again / for so long / I am in the mood / to be forgotten.

Do you see current events differently because you were raised by a black father and are married to a black man? I am surprised they haven’t left already — things have gotten downright frosty, nearly unbearable. A mob of them is apparently mouthing off outside when I put down my newspaper and we all gather to stand beside my daughter in the bay of kitchen windows.Quiscalus quiscula: this name sounds like a spell which, after its casting, will make things crumble into a complement of unanswerable questions. Though, if you need me to tell you God’s honest truth, I know nothing but their common name the morning we watch them attack our feeder. I complain about the mess they leave. Hulls I’ll have to sweep up or ignore. My father — who I am thankful is still alive — says We could use a different kind of seed

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18 These creatures of the languid Orient,— Rare pearls of caste, in their voluptuous swoon And gilded ease, by Eunuchs watched and pent, And doomed to hear the lute’s perpetual tune, Were passion’s toys—to lust an ornament; But not such was our thrush-voiced Octoroon,— The Southland beauty who was wont to hear Faith’s tender secrets whispered in her ear. 19 “An honest man’s the noblest work of”—No! That threadbare old mistake I’ll not repeat. A lovely woman—do you not think so?— Is God’s best work. That she is man’s helpmeet, The Bible says, and I will let it go; And yet she crowns and makes his life complete. Who would not shrive himself in her dear face, And find his sinless Heaven in her embrace! 20 Young Maury loved his slave—she was his own; A gift, for all he questioned, from the skies. Not other fortune had he ever known, Like that which sparkled in her wild blue eyes. Her seal-brown locks and cheeks like roses blown, Were wealth to him that e’en the gods might prize. And when her slender waist to him he drew, The sum of every earthly bliss he knew. 21 They had grown up together,—he and she— A world unto themselves. All else was bare,— A desert to them and an unknown sea. Their lives were like the birds’ lives—free and fair, And flowed together like a melody. They could not live apart, Ah! silly pair! But since she was his slave, what need to say, A swarm of troubles soon beset their way? 22 Just in the dawn of blushing womanhood; Her swan-neck glimpsed through shocks of wavy hair; A hint of olives in her gentle blood, Suggesting passion in a rosy lair; This shapely Venus of the cabins stood, In all but birth a princess, tall and fair; And is it any wonder that this brave And proud young master came to love his slave? 28 If it be shame to love a pretty woman, Then shameful loving is a pretty thing. And of all things the most divinely human Is this:—Love purifies life’s Fountain Spring; And he who has not quaffed that fount is no man— I’d rather be a lover than a king. And then, preach as we will or may, we’ll find That Cupid, dear young god, is sometimes blind. 55 Before the world, I hold that none of these: The Shushan slave, the Oreb shepherdess, Nor Moab’s gleaner, ever had the ease Of carriage, grace of speech, the stateliness Of step and pose, nor had the art to please And charm with symphonies of form and dress, Nor had such wond’rous eyes, such lovely mouth, As had this blue-eyed daughter [Lena] of the South! 56 Had priest or prophet ever heard her singing, Or seen her, where the clover was in bloom, Wading knee-deep, while larks were upward springing, And winds could scarcely breathe for want of room— Thus seen her from the dappled hillsides bringing The cows home, in the sunset’s golden gloom, Our good old Bible would have had much more Of love and romance mixed with sacred lore. 57 What man is there who would not dare defend A life like this? Is doing so a sin? Or who should blush to be known as her friend? White wonder of creation, fashioned in The moulds of loveliness; kings might contend On martial fields a prize like her to win, And yet, the cabin’s hate and mansion’s scorn,— She suffered both, betwixt them being born. 59 When genial Spring first hears the mating thrush, Where waters gossip and the wild flowers throng, Love rears her altar in the leafy bush, And Nature chants the sweetest bridal-song. When love is free, with madness in its rush, Its very strength defends the heart from wrong. Love, when untutored, walks a harmless way, With feet, though bare, that never go astray. 153 Mind knows no death. Life is the “first and last.” The falling leaf leaves its source living still; The flower which withers in the autumn blast Dies not, but thus escapes the winter’s chill, And will return, through changes strange and vast, When summoned forth to range o’er vale and hill. Shall mind which thus perceives Life’s changes die? Hath only matter immortality? 156 But, “if a man die, shall he live again?” This baffling question comes from long ago. Shall ashes only of Life’s torch remain? The mind cries out, and Nature answers, “No!” Ye who have heard the prophesying rain, And seen the flowery Resurrection glow: Ye know of better things than eye hath seen; Ye know sere Earth is Mother of the green. 157 The wild moose shivers in the north land’s breath, Where Huron’s wave upbraids the fretful shore; The marsh fowl far to southward wandereth And calls her tribes to milder climes explore; All Nature seems to sigh: “Remember death, For all the living soon shall be no more.” But mark how Faith sweeps on with tireless wing, To find for e’en the fowl an endless spring. 159 Let scoffers mock, let unbelief deny— Agnosticism stolidly ignore; Let worldly wisdom proudly ask us, “Why?” And still the soul cries out for something more— For something better than philosophy— Still longs for higher joys and looks before; And cannot rest—will ne’er contented be, Till triumph over matter leaves mind free. 160 Then hail we all the spirits of the just, With Lena we shall join them all. The mind Now risen looks down on Life’s unmeaning dust, And soars to higher spheres—all unconfined; To spheres of love and duty, hope and trust; And leaves the sordid and corrupt behind. The Virgin is the sign of vanquished night, Her child is born—born of the soul—the Light. 161 Farewell! In grandeur sinks the closing day, And on our vision slowly fades the light; And bygone scenes, like shadows fall away, To settle in the blank of coming night. The Octoroon has passed, but not for aye; To those who have the gift of inner sight, The spirit of all nature prophesies A home for love and beauty in the skies.

I remember that store, and the nasty redneck whose stink seemed a challenge to everyone in it. The scene is decades old, but I'm still confused that no one took up the challenge—including me, though I liked an occasional fight back then. The prospect of pain meant less to me once, I guess. An aneurism had just killed my brother, so the pain I'm talking about was my body's. I breathed up another pain that day. I checked the man's beat pickup; why would he want them, those skunks knee-deep in its bed? I left the lot still more confused, my sweet retriever shivering on the seat beside me. The godawful smell still clung to the dog's wet coat, and my own. There'd be no more hikes for us that morning: rain had arrived, bone-chilling. If you killed a skunk, why would you keep the thing? To kill some time, I stopped at The Jackpot View. We've always called it that. Five mountaintops bled into mists to my east in New Hampshire. The sudden squalls spilled leaves on the woods-floor's pall of nondescript hue. Now he was dead. Now my brother was dead. I can't define any God, but only this morning, I caught a whiff of road-killed skunk and thought I could speak of Him or Her or It as surely as I could tell you the slightest thing concerning the man I'm remembering now, the one who shot or trapped or clubbed those miserable reeking creatures. The smallest enigmas we ever encounter remain as hard to explain as all the epical ones. I've failed for years to fathom the death of my brother; but it's just as hard to understand why a scene in an old Vermont store should linger like dead-skunk odor, which if you've lately been tainted comes back to scent you whenever a rain blows in—or like some pains you may have thought you'd forever gotten over, but which at some odd prompting come back to haunt you.

For Ben’s project he must research five facts about his African-American hero and write them on poster board. He chooses Harriet Tubman, whose five facts are:Her father’s name was Ben. Her mother’s name was Old Rit. She was born in 1820 and died in 1913. She was born in Maryland and died in New York. Ben asks for advice about his fifth fact and I suggest:She led more than 300 people to freedom. Ben sighs the way he does now and says,Everyone knows that, Mom. So I try to remember the book we read yesterday, search for the perfect fact, the one that will match his four facts and satisfy his almost-seven mind. Remember, I ask,she was a spy for the North during the Civil War? It’s a hit! He writes it: Harriet Tubman was a spy for the north during the civil war. It was a war between the north which is where the slaves were trying to get and the south which is where they were. Before the war, Abraham Lincoln signed a form that said All the slaves everywhere are free! which is one of the reasons they were fighting. On summer mornings, Lincoln rode his horse to work down the Seventh Street Turnpike close to my new home. Down Georgia Avenue past The Hunger Stopper and Pay Day 2 Go and liquor stores and liquor stores. Past Cluck-U-Chicken and Fish in the ‘Hood and Top Twins Faze II Authentic African Cuisine and the newish Metro station and all those possibilities gleaming in developers’ eyes. There goes Lincoln’s horse down Georgia Avenue from the Soldier’s Home to the White House – much cooler up here in the country, in the neighborhood, at the hospital. And there’s Walt Whitman, the sworn poet of every dauntless rebel the world over, hanging around his street corner every morning to bow to the president at Thomas Circle by the homeless guys. It’s 100 years now since any president summered at the Soldier’s Home. But I was born only 50 years after Harriet Tubman died, all the centuries we drag into the next century and the next. Writing here, in my new neighborhood, the city old and new around me, I see Harriet Tubman and Lincoln and Uncle Walt and the true stories and sometimes our own despair like Washington’s summer malaria, her 40 war hospitals, Whitman moving from bed to bed, stroking the hair of so many dying boys. North up Georgia Avenue in our own soldiers’ home – Walter Reed – the boys and now girls too mourn the ghosts of their own legs and arms and our capacity for love. Where is their sworn poet? Harriet Tubman born so close. All these heroes under our feet.

We knew the rules and punishments: three lashes for lack of diligence, eight for disobeying mother or telling lies....No blood, he’d say, and no remission. Came a day he started keeping my account, as at a store. And came another he called me to the tannery: a Sunday, day of settlement. I’d paid one-third the owed amount when he, to my astonishment, handed the blue-beech switch to me. Always, the greatest of my fears were not his whippings, but his tears, and he was tearful now. I dared not disobey, nor strike him hard. “I will consider a weak blow no blow at all, rather a show of cowardice,” he said.No blood and no remission

They just can’t seem to . . . They should try harder to . . . They ought to be more . . . We all wish they weren’t so . . . They never . . . They always . . . Sometimes they . . . Once in a while they . . . However it is obvious that they . . . Their overall tendency has been . . . The consequences of which have been . . . They don’t appear to understand that . . . If only they would make an effort to . . . But we know how difficult it is for them to . . . Many of them remain unaware of . . . Some who should know better simply refuse to . . . Of course, their perspective has been limited by . . . On the other hand, they obviously feel entitled to . . . Certainly we can’t forget that they . . . Nor can it be denied that they . . . We know that this has had an enormous impact on their . . . Nevertheless their behavior strikes us as . . . Our interactions unfortunately have been . . .