This is an African worm
but then a worm in any land
is still a worm.
It will not stride, run, stand up
before butterflies, who
have passed their worm-like state.
It must keep low, not lift its head.
I’ve had a dread experience, I know.
A worm can do no thing but crawl.
Crawl and wait…..
Reference:
Margaret Danner
Hey Cool Papa, I see picture of you in your later years
Tall black skin withered, straight, proud. You must have been a streak of black gold flashing around the bases like some great African warrior misplaced…
It is said you scored from first on a bunt against the all-white major league all-stars.
You were forty summers then and they wanted to know how you did it.
Was it magic, was it voodoo, was it a freak of segregation, was it special compensation for national mental inferiority in the labs of Stanford?
I was four in this photograph fishing with my grandparents at a lake in Michigan.
My brother squats in poison ivy.
His Davy Crockett cap sits squared on his head so the raccoon tail flounces down the back of his sailor suit.
My grandfather sits to the far right in a folding chair,
and I know his left hand is on the tobacco in his pants pocket because I used to wrap it for him every Christmas.
The bird is lost,
Dead, with all the music:
Whole sunsets heard the brain’s music
Faded to last horizon notes.
I do not know why I hold
This skull, smaller than a walnut’s,
Against my ear,
Expecting to hear
The smashed fear
Of childhoods from…bone;
Expecting to see
Wind nosing red and purple,
Strange gold and magic
On bubbled windowpanes
Of childhood.
Ah, Douglass, we have fall’n on evil days,
Such days as thou, not even thou didst know,
When thee, the eyes of that harsh long ago
Saw, salient, at the cross of devious ways,
And all the country heard thee with amaze.
Not ended then, the passionate ebb and flow,
The awful tide that battled to and fro;
We ride amid a tempest of dispraise.
Now, when the waves of swift, dissension swarm,
And Honor, the strong pilot, lieth stark,
Oh, for thy voice high-sounding o’er the storm,
For thy strong arm to guide the shivering bark,
The blast-defying power of thy form,
To give us comf
The night was made for rest and sleep,
For winds that softly sigh;
It was not made for grief and tears;
So why then do I cry?
The wind that blows through leafy trees
Is soft and warm and sweet;
For me the night is a gracious cloak
To hide my soul’s defeat.
Just one dark hour of shaken depths,
Of bitter black despair-
Another day will find me brave,
And not afraid to dare…..
Reference:
Clarissa Scott Delaney
Where are we to go when this is done?
Will we slip into old, accustomed ways,
finding remembered notches, one by one?
Thrashing a hapless way through quickening haze?
Who is to know us when the end has come?
Old friends and families, but could we be strange
to the sight and stricken dumb at visions of some pulsing memory?
Who will love us for what we used to be
who now are what we are, bitter or cold?
Who is to nurse us with swift subtlety
back to the warm and feeling human fold?
Where are we to go when this is through?
We are the war-born.
I had no thoughts of violets of late,
The wild, shy kind that spring beneath your feet
In wistful April days, when lovers mate
And wander through the fields in raptures sweet.
The thought of violets meant florist shops,
And bows and pins, and perfumed papers fine;
And garnish lights, and mincing little fops
And cabarets and songs, and deadening wine
So far from sweet real things my thoughts had strayed,
I had forgot wide fields, and clear brown streams;
The perfect loveliness that god has made,-
Wild violets shy and Heaven-mounting dreams.
And now-unwittingly, you’ve made me d
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