white people
strange customed
clan tongued clustering dark people ports ages of europa
trains boats and planes
dionne warwick says
& in new york
fluid dark causeways gang-planked streets eerie lights of darkness clustering natives
tightly bundled europeans of the 400 millennial
fighting peoples of clans & kabalas
axed gunshot ancestors
stained blood fibers of cellular centuries
some baked some fried
some burned some blue……….
copyright 1965, by David Henderson.
O, come, you pious youth! Adore The wisdom of thy god,
In bringing thee from distant shore, To learn His holy word,
Thou mightst been left behind, Amidst a dark abode;
God’s tender mercy still combined, Thou hast the holy word.
The sale began-young girls were there,
Defenseless in their wretchedness,
Whose stifled sobs of deep despair
Revealed their anguish and distress.
And Mothers stood with streaming eyes,
And saw their dearest children sold;
Unheeded rose their bitter cries,
While tyrants battered them for gold.
And women, with her love and truth-
For those in sable forms may dwell-
Gazed on the husband of her youth,
With anguish none may paint or tell.
And men, whose sole crime was their hue,
The impress of their Maker’s hand,
And frail and shrieking children, too,
Were gathered in that mo
Sex fingers toes
in the marketplace
near your father’s church
in hamlet , North Carolina-
witness to this love
in this calm fallow
of these minds, there is no substitute for pain:
genitals gone or going,
seed burned out,
you tuck the roots in the earth,
turn back, and move
by the river through the swamps,
singing a love supreme, a love supreme;
what does it all mean?
Loss, so great each black
woman expects your failure
in mute change, the seed gone.
You plod up into the electric city-
your song now crystal and
the blues.
As I talk with learned people,
I have heard a strange remark,
Quite beyond my comprehension,
And I’m stumbling in the dark.
They advise: Don’t be too modest,
Whatsoever thing is said,
Give to everything its color,
Always call a spade a spade.
Now I am not versed in Logic,
Nor these high-flown classic things,
And am not adept in solving
Flighty aphoristic flings;
So this proverb seems to baffle
All the efforts I have made-
Now what else is there to call it,
When a spade is just a spade?????
From: an anthology of verse by American Negroes,
reprinted by permission of Mo
My father is a handsome guy.
Looks like a cross between Clark Gable & Ernest Hemingway.
If you don’t believe me, I got proof:
Once a white woman (at one of those parties)
said to my father,
“You’re good looking for a colored man.”
Drifting night in the Georgia pines,
coonskin drum and jubilee banjo.
Pretty Malinda, dance with me.
Night is an African juju man
weaving a wish and a weariness together
to make two wings.
O fly away home fly away
Do you remember Africa?
O cleave the air fly away home
My gran , he flew back to Africa,
just spread his arms
and flew away home.
Drifting night in the windy pines;
night is a laughing, night is a longing.
Pretty Malinda, come to me.
Night is a mourning juju man
weaving a wish and a weariness together
to make two wings.
O
learn moreFrom the Indians who welcomed the Pilgrims
To the buffalo who once ruled the plains;
Like the vultures circling beneath the dark clouds,
Looking for the rain/looking for the rain.
From the cities that stagger on the coast lines
In a nation that just can’t take much more/
Like the forest buried beneath the highways, never had a chance to grow/never had a chance to grow.
It’s winter; winter in America and all of the leaders have been killed or forced away.
It’s winter; winter in America and ain’t nobody fighting ’cause nobody knows what to save.
The con-stitution was a noble piec
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