Fellows

WHAT THERE WAS

Pine, catalpa, pin oak, persimmon,

but not tree.

Hummingbird, hoot owl, martin, crow,

but not bird.

Cannas, honeysuckle, cockscomb, rose,

but not flower.

Wood smoke, corn, dust, outhouse,

but not stench.

A spider spinning in a rain barrel,

the silver dipper by the back porch,

tadpoles shimmying against a concrete bank,

but not silence.

A cotton row, a bucket lowered into a well,

a red dirt road, a winging crow,

but not distance.

A rooster crowing, cows lowing in the evening,

wasps humming beneath the eaves, hounds

baying, hot grease, but not music.

My mother running away at fifteen,

my grandmother lifting a truck to save a life,

an uncle at Pearl Harbor, Webster sitting

at the back of the bus when he looked as white

as they did, but not stories.

The entrails of a slaughtered sow, the child born

with a goat's face, the cousin laid on a railroad

track, the fire that burned it all, but not death.

This poem, a snuff tin sated with the hair

of all our dead, my mother's long talks

with her dead father, my great-grandmother's

clothes passed down, passed down, but not memory.

I live in Detroit

 

She said I live in Detroit. And there are no flowers in Detroit.
So why would anyone in Detroit write about flowers in Detroit.

I don’t tell her we live under the trees. Root up curbs and dam fire hydrants
to water black pansies licked to the sides of popped black balloons in Detroit.

I’m smashed with the fish under Eastern Market. When the flower vendors
douse the cement, I’m the pollen blown off backs of butterflies in Detroit.

Like a lot of flowers, I have split my stem. Cleaved into root balls. Stuck to sweaty
bus windows. Like so much dandelion, I get rinsed down shelter shower drains in Detroit.

There are plenty of violets in flophouses. Pistols broken open
on forty-ounce mouth lids making honeybees bastards in Detroit.

I don’t tell her look around you. I don’t point out the bottoms of coffee cups
where the city spits iris and scratches the back of your throat in Detroit.

I tell her: some of our mothers rescued begonias with cheap plastic planters.
Some of them braided pine into sheets, so we could never sleep again in Detroit.

I wonder if it counts if I wish for frangipani. When I dream in ten spikes of passionflower
to cuff inside my elbow. If I can’t leave. Is that enough flower grounded in Detroit.

- from Boxcar Poetry Review, November 2008

LOVE SONG FOR WOODY

John Ford tried to do right by you

in Sergeant Rutledge, made you

the title character, a ‘star’ – but

couldn’t. Still the same old

narrative: the stoic black man

intent on saving whites.

You always played “The Namibian,”

“Ethiopia in chains,” the sweat-drenched

galley slave, was called

“My ‘boy’ Pompey” by John Wayne

in Liberty Valence

but never were

 those things. That hard dark chiseled face a mask

quietly seething, your eyes encyclopedic

daggers (or were they quiet too, blank dark lakes?)

your body tall and lean and straight

saber-sharp slicing through

every menial role, spoke silently to

one yearning boy, glued to his

TV screen: Look – Here is a Man.

You never shuffled or even

walked through my childhood

viejo. You

Strode.

SUGAR FIRE

“Etta could sing the Sears catalog and make you want to buy every item.” ~ Marvin Gaye on Etta James

Had she taken a shine to it,

no doubt she could have sung

the praises and practical benefits

of screwdrivers, table napkins, pantyhose

But Etta’s business was the heart

with all its magic and mess,

her mission like love itself:

impossible, immaculate

Yet somehow

with her jazzy honky-tonk

and bluesy gutbucket growl

Etta accomplished the task,

singing her soul until the sound

poured like sugar and fire

from her blonde bouffant head,

her music

a sweet, hot cleansing

that made equals of all lovers:

the jilted, the wishful,

the blessed and the badass

Etta’s grooves and ballads

a melodic mirror

where if only for a spell

folks could find reflection and rest

before tumbling headlong again

into love’s brutal, luscious thunder

Dusk of the Afrikaner

Aku’langa latshona lingenanduba.

                        - Zulu proverb

I.

1        ONCE UPON A TIME, WHEN TIME was measured in the length of shadows, I met a woman–on a dirt road much like this one—who did not know the smell of rain.  

2        How sad, she said to no one.  I want to know it.

3        Her long Zulu eyes were not nearly as long as her gaze, on this day, impossibly February: heat billowing in waves; the once-White sun finally lowering among the aloes, by great pallbearers of Light, into the ground.

4        On the day I met this umfazi, I stumbled over her shadow & felt a sudden chill.  Sure & black as thunderclouds.

5        Far beyond the townships, beyond rivers of dust with no memory of the sea, her gathering shadow was easily the longest I’d ever seen.  It must have been the longest in the world. 

6        As a desert without clouds, she said. As a sleep without dreams.

7        Such a shadow must have meant she was very old.  Perhaps, the oldest woman in the world. 

8        But I am not, she said, as if burning the pages in my eyes.       

II.

1        THEN, LIKE A MIGHTY black river of Night, the umfazi’s shadow fell across the Earth, crushing the aloes & the hills & the trees.  & all throughout Zululand, the blackest nightmare of one became the other’s dream.

2        & the sky wept. 

3        Like one who has not wept for centuries might weep, she said.  With the kind of weeping which feels like thunder, which makes the earth shudder, which portends the end of days.

4        & some ran for shelter. & some ran for the sea. But millions more had waited lifetimes for this storm.  Through moon, through sun, they clutched the aching earth. 

5        Till rain & mud, she said, became tears & blood.

6        & there they stood.  As ones who have not stood for centuries might stand. As if standing for something, she said. As if suddenly aware of the straightness of their own posture.

7        Then they raised their faces like black moonflowers till the whole of Zululand was ablaze with Midnight

8        & stars rained from her tongue—this witness, this poet—so moved she was by their forgotten beauty.

an excerpt from Jena, Louisiana 

1. 

What if—when they told those kids

to sit under that tree, they knew

they knew that black folks couldn’t walk

under the same sky without there being

some trouble. The very fact that black

had to ask white to sit under a tree

was a bad sign, bad as someone

brushing your ankles with a broom.

2.

Don’t ever believe what white folks tell you.

3. 

Imagine a painting like Gauguin, the

silhouette of a dark body hangs

from a tree; against the muted brush

strokes thick with a setting sun, a black

boy rises to the pulpit and testifies.

Postcard to My Third Crush Today

I’ve been on the move; the bottoms

of my shoes have rested on 48 states,

four Canadian Provinces, seven countries,

three continents and the crush is constant.

You look like someone’s daughter;

I find that so attractive. I once

thought this, but now it’s someone’s

mother or aunt more often than not

or cousin or uncle or brother or son

on occasion. The crush is everywhere

or maybe it’s me, my luck, like always

seeing the corner crooners by the storefront

of The Heart, loitering—singing for quarters

and grins.  Most days I can count on the first

and second crush, and sometimes there’s a fifth

or sixth. They’re as likely not to notice me

as to smile in my eyes. Either way my heart

skips like those flat stones that kiss the skin

of the pond and fly off again before sinking.

Today it is you in that polka dot dress I need

to thank for getting me to three. The Heart’s

a big chain; there’s one everywhere you go,

and they rarely have those No Loitering signs.

You’re more likely to see No Solicitations.

I’ll leave this postcard here for you to find.

several rappers slain

several rappers slain
in whole foods, feedback, couplets
and beats spill in aisles

a rain bursts in the
store, they page Jah for clean up,
Jah to the cafe,

to the register.
can he be everywhere at
once? the manager

calls Rasta to put
a science pon it, but he's
out on a smoke break

it will be fifteen
minutes, maybe little more?
a bent, white spinster

veil raised, asks if i
know when watermelons are
ripe. i tell her i

will divine it, i
will knock on it. i will go
consult oracles

or break it over
her head and know then by the
coolness on my feet

now filling with rain
water, grave sites hum making
bodies into songs

Alive

 for Sojourner Truth

A tongue should not bear the memory of blood

the tangy sweetness of flesh torn

the ancestral river disturbed.

The old ones know

lashings sting like a searing cry ignored

but this is not a sound to rejoice.

Still, even I admit the subtle satisfaction

from the warm trickle

bruises reverberating like drums announcing

bloated skin the color of late summer plums

How tender we

the living

remain.

Under the Suburbian Sky

a small boy travels with backpack out

past the last subway stop. dark green

shrubbery on the knoll & places backpack

under the sky, just before the moon, a stone’s throw

from his head to dream, but indeed he can

dream a brave new world, new angles

where he not subset to human. but human

in the universe, on the right angle of god

perhaps everywhere else too, dark green

shrubbery moving alongside earth’s rotation

just before the moon. & under the sky the small boy thinks free

with earth, with all things spiritual:

the sea spray the box elder, just before the moon

october’s gentle winds whisper come back home

inhale a new kind of individual but not

really an individual, a human being

under a canopy of falling stars wonderfully

hard to center, a universal free & good.

Still Life

A Portrait of Ida Mae Johnson

�

I’m his first born free child.

Papa’s favorite. Never knew mama.

Red poppies on each corner of her quilt won’t let me forget.

Mama’s last breath was my first.

 We left the south cause Papa

wanted more for his family up here in Iowa.

Papa’s lungs coughed blue black red powder

That’s how all the railroad builders died in Council Bluffs

Motherless. Now fatherless.

Seamstress by trade. Scared of this child growing growing in my belly.

I am not comfortable in skin.

So I wrap this quilt around old bones.

Each day since papa died

I have sewn a new patch.

Use scraps of papa’s worn kerchief

deep yellow gone pale to warm the room.

Today I won’t let the camera catch me.

Remember: Papa said I was his prettiest.

Papa, I’ll tell that to my baby and

wrap my child in mama’s quilt.

© Juliet P. Howard / 2011