194 Racism and discrimination poems

I was here before the blackamoors were photographed & cataloged, when they first ran up to me & then receded into their poses, descendants of archival Hamites destined to serve their brothers & sisters in a red baroque room, each silent as an iron doorstop. Some peered out of perches askance, shining lanterns & sconces, ready to please, or eager to cast a guiding light among centuries of shadows, a patina of mystery lost in Tuscan dusk. At least their attire isn’t stitched rags. If ebony & alabaster could talk, Lord, the volumes of gossip among  gold-leafed tributes we would hear as vinegar turns back to wine, driftwood to bread. They’ve been perfectly arranged, & almost reveal whose sweat glosses their smooth skin in these rooms of rehearsal. I saw one shift slightly & blink, or maybe it was a dark hum coming from the olive grove, a feeling brought across the sea. They are not claw-footed props & furniture for drunken nights posed to grab a hat or fur coat, dressed in skeins of filigree & false gems, offering a bowl of  black grapes to each envoy or a guest holding a dagger behind his upright back.

I AS SEEN BY DISCIPLINES There they are. Thirty at the corner. Black, raw, ready. Sores in the city that do not want to heal. II THE LEADERS Jeff. Gene. Geronimo. And Bop. They cancel, cure and curry. Hardly the dupes of the downtown thing the cold bonbon, the rhinestone thing. And hardly in a hurry. Hardly Belafonte, King, Black Jesus, Stokely, Malcolm X or Rap. Bungled trophies. Their country is a Nation on no map. Jeff, Gene, Geronimo and Bop in the passionate noon, in bewitching night are the detailed men, the copious men. They curry, cure, they cancel, cancelled images whose Concerts are not divine, vivacious; the different tins are intense last entries; pagan argument; translations of the night. The Blackstone bitter bureaus (bureaucracy is footloose) edit, fuse unfashionable damnations and descent; and exulting, monstrous hand on monstrous hand, construct, strangely, a monstrous pearl or grace. III GANG GIRLS A Rangerette Gang Girls are sweet exotics. Mary Ann uses the nutrients of her orient, but sometimes sighs for Cities of blue and jewel beyond her Ranger rim of Cottage Grove. (Bowery Boys, Disciples, Whip-Birds will dissolve no margins, stop no savory sanctities.) Mary is a rose in a whiskey glass. Mary’s Februaries shudder and are gone. Aprils fret frankly, lilac hurries on. Summer is a hard irregular ridge. October looks away. And that’s the Year! Save for her bugle-love. Save for the bleat of not-obese devotion. Save for Somebody Terribly Dying, under the philanthropy of robins. Save for her Ranger bringing an amount of rainbow in a string-drawn bag. “Where did you get the diamond?” Do not ask: but swallow, straight, the spirals of his flask and assist him at your zipper; pet his lips and help him clutch you. Love’s another departure. Will there be any arrivals, confirmations? Will there be gleaning? Mary, the Shakedancer’s child from the rooming-flat, pants carefully, peers at her laboring lover .... Mary! Mary Ann! Settle for sandwiches! settle for stocking caps! for sudden blood, aborted carnival, the props and niceties of non-loneliness— the rhymes of Leaning.

If Black History Month is not viable then wind does not carry the seeds and drop them on fertile ground rain does not dampen the land and encourage the seeds to root sun does not warm the earth and kiss the seedlings and tell them plain: You’re As Good As Anybody Else You’ve Got A Place Here, Too

This is how it was: they had their own churches, their own schools, schoolbuses, football teams, bands and majorettes, separate restaurants, in all the public places their own bathrooms, at the doctor’s their own waiting room, in the Tribune a column for their news, in the village a neighborhood called Sugar Hill, uneven rows of unresponsive houses that took the maids back in each afternoon— in our homes used the designated door, on Trailways sat in the back, and at the movie paid at a separate entrance, stayed upstairs. Saturdays, a double feature drew the local kids as the town bulged, families surfacing for groceries, medicine and wine, the black barber, white clerks in the stores—crowds lined the sidewalks, swirled through the courthouse yard, around the stone soldier and the flag, and still I never saw them on the street. It seemed a chivalric code laced the milk: you’d try not to look and they would try to be invisible. Once, on my way to the creek, I went without permission to the tenants’ log cabin near the barns, and when Aunt Susie opened the door, a cave yawned, and beyond her square, leonine, freckled face, in the hushed interior, Joe White lumbered up from the table, six unfolding feet of him, dark as a gun-barrel, his head bent to clear the chinked rafters, and I caught the terrifying smell of sweat and grease, smell of the woodstove, nightjar, straw mattress— This was rural Piedmont, upper south; we lived on a farm but not in poverty. When finally we got our own TV, the evening news with its hooded figures of the Ku Klux Klan seemed like another movie—King Solomon’s Mines, the serial of Atlantis in the sea. By then I was thirteen, and no longer went to movies to see movies. The downstairs forged its attentions forward, toward the lit horizon, but leaning a little to one side or the other, arranging the pairs that would own the county, stores and farms, everything but easy passage out of there— and through my wing-tipped glasses the balcony took on a sullen glamor: whenever the film sputtered on the reel, when the music died and the lights came on, I swiveled my face up to where they whooped and swore, to the smoky blue haze and that tribe of black and brown, licorice, coffee, taffy, red oak, sweet tea— wanting to look, not knowing how to see, I thought it was a special privilege to enter the side door, climb the stairs and scan the even rows below—trained bears in a pit, herded by the stringent rule, while they were free, lounging above us, their laughter pelting down on us like trash.

(On the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama, 1963) “Mother dear, may I go downtown Instead of out to play, And march the streets of Birmingham In a Freedom March today?” “No, baby, no, you may not go, For the dogs are fierce and wild, And clubs and hoses, guns and jails Aren’t good for a little child.” “But, mother, I won’t be alone. Other children will go with me, And march the streets of Birmingham To make our country free.” “No, baby, no, you may not go, For I fear those guns will fire. But you may go to church instead And sing in the children’s choir.” She has combed and brushed her night-dark hair, And bathed rose petal sweet, And drawn white gloves on her small brown hands, And white shoes on her feet. The mother smiled to know her child Was in the sacred place, But that smile was the last smile To come upon her face. For when she heard the explosion, Her eyes grew wet and wild. She raced through the streets of Birmingham Calling for her child. She clawed through bits of glass and brick, Then lifted out a shoe. “O, here’s the shoe my baby wore, But, baby, where are you?”

Rudolph Reed was oaken. His wife was oaken too. And his two good girls and his good little man Oakened as they grew. “I am not hungry for berries. I am not hungry for bread. But hungry hungry for a house Where at night a man in bed ”May never hear the plaster Stir as if in pain. May never hear the roaches Falling like fat rain. “Where never wife and children need Go blinking through the gloom. Where every room of many rooms Will be full of room. ”Oh my home may have its east or west Or north or south behind it. All I know is I shall know it, And fight for it when I find it.“ It was in a street of bitter white That he made his application. For Rudolph Reed was oakener Than others in the nation. The agent’s steep and steady stare Corroded to a grin. Why, you black old, tough old hell of a man, Move your family in!

After Lauren Halsey and Mike Demps

1.   smoke above the burning bush 2.   archnemesis of summer night 3.   first son of soil 4.   coal awaiting spark & wind 5.   guilty until proven dead 6.   oil heavy starlight 7.   monster until proven ghost 8.   gone 9.   phoenix who forgets to un-ash 10. going, going, gone 11. gods of shovels & black veils 12. what once passed for kindling 13. fireworks at dawn 14. brilliant, shadow hued coral 15. (I thought to leave this blank but who am I to name us nothing?) 16. prayer who learned to bite & sprint 17. a mother’s joy & clutched breath

Those four black girls blown up in that Alabama church remind me of five hundred middle passage blacks, in a net, under water in Charleston harbor so redcoats wouldn't find them. Can't find what you can't see can you?

The survey says all groups can make more money if they lose weight except black men...men of other colors and women of all colors have more gold, but black men are the summary of weight, a lead thick thing on the scales, meters spinning until they ring off the end of the numbering of accumulation, how things grow heavy, fish on the ends of lines that become whales, then prehistoric sea life beyond all memories, the billion days of human hands working, doing all the labor one can imagine, hands now the population of cactus leaves on a papyrus moon waiting for the fire, the notes from all their singing gone up into the salt breath of tears of children that dry, rise up to be the crystalline canopy of promises, the infinite gone fishing days with the apologies for not being able to love anymore, gone down inside earth somewhere where women make no demands, have fewer dreams of forever, these feet that marched and ran and got cut off, these hearts torn out of chests by nameless thieves, this thrashing until the chaff is gone out and black men know the gold of being the dead center of things, where pain is the gateway to Jerusalems, Bodhi trees, places for meditation and howling, keeping the weeping heads of gods in their eyes.