or our backs, any longer: baby,
find another Eden, another apple tree,
somewhere, if you can,
and find some other natives, somewhere else,
to listen to you bellow
till you come, just like a man,
but we don’t need you,
are sick of being a fantasy to feed you,
and of being the principal accomplice to your
crime:
for, it is your crime, now, the cross to which you
cling,
your Alpha and Omega for everything.
Well (others have told you)
your clown’s grown weary, the puppet master
is bored speechless with this monotonous disaster,
and is long gone, does not belong to you,
any more than my woman, or my child,
ever belonged to you.
During this long travail
our ancestors spoke to us, and we listened,
and we tried to make you hear life in our song
but now it matters not at all to me
whether you know what I am talking about – or not:
I know why we are not blinded
by your brightness, are able to see you,
who cannot see us. I know
why we are still here.
Godspeed.
The niggers are calculating,
from day to day, life everlasting,
and wish you well:
but decline to imitate the Son of the Morning,
and rule in Hell.
Song
(for Skip)
1
I believe, my brother,
that some are haunted by a song,
all day, and all the midnight long:
I’m going to tell
God
how you treated
Me:
one of these days.
Now, if that song tormented me,
I could have no choice but be
winter than a bleaching bone
of all the ways there are,
this must be the most dreadful
way to be alone.
White rejects light
while blackness drinks it in
becoming many colours
and stone holds heat
while grass smothers
and flowers die
and the sleeping snake
is hacked to pieces
while digesting his
(so to speak)
three-martini lunch.
Dread stalks our streets,
and our faces.
Many races
gather, again,
to despise and disperse
and destroy us:
nor can they any longer pretend
to be looking for a friend.
That dream was sold
when we were,
on the auction-block
of Manifest Destiny.
Time is not money.
Time
is
time.
And the time has come, again,
to outwit and outlast
survive and surmount
the authors of the blasphemy
of our chains.
At least, we know a
man, when we see one,
a shackle, when we wear one,
or a chain, when we bear one,
a noose from a halter,
or a pit from an altar.
We, who have been blinded,
are not blind
and sense when not to
trust the mind.
Time is not money.
Time is time.
You made the money.
We made the rhyme.
Our children are.
Our children are.
Our children are:
which means that we must be
the pillar of cloud by day
and of fire by night:
the guiding star.
2
My beloved brother,
I know your walk
and love to hear you
talk that talk
while your furrowed brow
grows young with wonder,
like a small boy, staring at the thunder.
I see you, somehow,
about the age of ten,
determined to enter the world of men,
yet, not too far from your mother’s lap,
wearing your stunning
baseball cap.
Perhaps, then, around eleven,
wondering what to take as given,
and, not much later, going through
the agony bequeathed to you.
Then, spun around, then going under,
the small boy staring at the thunder.
Then, take it all
and use it well
this manhood, calculating
through this hell.
3
Who says better? Who knows more
than those who enter at that door
called back
for Black,
by Christians, who
raped your mother
and, then, lynched you,
seed from their loins,
flesh of their flesh,
bone of their bone:
what an interesting way
to be alone!
Time is not money:
time is time.
And a man is a man, my brother,
and a crime remains
a crime.
The time our fathers bought for us
resides in a place no man can reach
except he be prepared
to disintegrate himself into atoms,
into smashed fragments of bleaching bone,
which is, indeed, the great temptation
beckoning this disastrous nation.
It may, indeed, precisely, be
all that they claim as History.
Those who required, of us, a song,
know that their hour is not long.
Our children are
the morning star.
Munich, Winter 1973
(for Y.S.)
In a strange house,
a strange bed
in a strange town,
a very strange me
is waiting for you.
Now
it is very early in the morning.
The silence is loud.
The baby is walking about
with his foaming bottle,
making strange sounds
and deciding, after all,
to be my friend.
You
arrive tonight.
How dull time is!
How empty – and yet,
since I am sitting here,
lying here,
walking up and down here,
waiting,
I see
that time’s cruel ability
to make one wait
is time’s reality.
I see your hair
which I call red.
I lie here in this bed.
Someone teased me once,
a friend of ours –
saying that I saw your hair red
because I was not thinking
of the hair on your head.
Someone also told me,
a long time ago:
my father said to me,
It is a terrible thing,
son,
to fall into the hands of the living God.
Now,
I know what he was saying.
I could not have seen red
before finding myself
in this strange, this waiting bed.
Nor had my naked eye suggested
that colour was created
by the light falling, now,
on me,
in this strange bed,
waiting
where no one has ever rested
!
The streets, I observe,
are wintry.
It feels like snow.
Starlings circle in the sky,
conspiring,
together, and alone,
unspeakable journeys
into and out of the light.
I know
I will see you tonight.
And snow
may fall
enough to freeze our tongues
and scald our eyes.
We may never be found again!
Just as the birds above our heads
circling
are singing,
knowing
that, in what lies before them,
the always unknown passage,
wind, water, air,
the failing light
the falling night
the blinding sun
they must get the journey done.
Listen.
They have wings and voices
are making choices
are using what they have.
They are aware
that, on long journeys,
each bears the other,
whirring,
stirring
love occurring
in the middle of the terrifying air.
The giver
(for Berdis)
If the hope of giving
is to love the living,
the giver risks madness
in the act of giving.
Some such lesson I seemed to see
in the faces that surrounded me.
Needy and blind, unhopeful, unlifted,
what gift would give them the gift to be gifted?
The giver is no less adrift
than those who are clamouring for the gift.
If they cannot claim it, if it is not there,
if their empty fingers beat the empty air
and the giver goes down on his knees in prayer
knows that all of his giving has been for naught
and that nothing was ever what he thought
and turns in his guilty bed to stare
at the starving multitudes standing there
and rises from bed to curse at heaven,
he must yet understand that to whom much is given
much will be taken, and justly so:
I cannot tell how much I owe.
3.00 a.m.
(for David)
Two black boots,
on the floor,
figuring out what the walking’s for.
Two black boots,
now, together,
learning the price of the stormy weather.
To say nothing of the wear and tear
on
the mother-fucking
leather.
The darkest hour
The darkest hour
is just before the dawn,
and that, I see,
which does not guarantee
power to draw the next breath,
nor abolish the suspicion
that the brightest hour
we will ever see
occurs just before we cease
to be.
Imagination
Imagination
creates the situation,
and, then, the situation
creates imagination.
It may, of course,
be the other way around:
Columbus was discovered
by what he found.
Confession
Who knows more
of Wanda, the wan,
than I do?
And who knows more
of Terry, the torn,
than I do?
And who knows more
than I do
of Ziggy, the Zap,
fleeing the rap,
using his eyes and teeth
to spring the trap,
than I do!
Or did.
Good Lord, forbid
that morning’s acre,
held in the palm of the hand,
one’s fingers helplessly returning
dust to dust,
the dust crying out,
triumphantly,
take her!
Oh, Lord,
can these bones live?
I think, Yes,
then I think, No:
being witness to a blow
delivered outside of time,
witness to a crime
which time
is, in no way whatever,
compelled to see,
not being burdened with sight:
like me.
Oh, I watch Wanda,
Wanda, the wan,
making love with her pots,
and her frying pan:
feeding her cats,
who, never, therefore,
dream of catching the rats
who bar
her not yet barred
and most unusual door.
The cats make her wan,
a cat
(no matter how you cut him)
not being a man,
or a woman, either.
And, yet,
at that,
better than nothing:
But
nothing is not better than nothing:
nothing is nothing,
just like
everything is everything
(and you better believe it).
And,
Terry, the torn,
wishes he’d never been born
because he was found sucking a cock
in the shadow of a Central Park rock.
The cock was black,
like Terry,
and the killing, healing,
thrilling thing
was in nothing resembling a hurry:
came, just before the cops came,
and was long gone,
baby,
out of that park,
while the cops were writing down Terry’s name.
Well.
Birds do it.
Bees endlessly do it.
Cats leap jungles
cages and ages
to keep on doing it
and even survive
overheated apartments
and canned cat-food
doing it to each other
all day long.
It is one of the many forms of love,
and, even in the cat kingdom,
of survival:
but Wanda never looked
and Terry didn’t think he was a cat
and he was right about that.
Enter Ziggy, the Zap,
having taken the rap
for a friend,
fearing he was facing the end,
but very cool about it,
he thought,
selling
what others bought
(he thought).
But Wanda had left the bazaar
tricked by a tricky star.
She knew nothing of distance,
less of light,
the star vanished
and down came night.
Wanda thought this progression natural.
Refusing to moan,
she began to drink
far too alone
to dare to think.
I watch her open door.
She thinks that she wishes
to be a whore.
But whoredom is hard work,
stinks far too much of the real,
is as ruthless as a turning wheel,
and who knows more
of this
than I do?
Oh,
and Ziggy, the Zap,
who took the rap,
raps on
to his fellow prisoners
in the cell he never left
and will never leave.
You’d best believe
it’s cold outside.
Nobody
&nb
sp; wants to go where
nothing is everything
and everything adds up
to nothing.
Better to slide
into the night
cling to the memory
of the shameful rock
which watched as the shameful act occurred
yet spoke no warning
said not a word.
And who knows more
of shame, and rocks,
than I do?
Oh,
and Wanda, the wan,
will never forgive her sky.
That’s why the old folks say
(and who knows better than I?)
we will understand it
better
by and by.
My Lord.
I understand it,
now:
the why is not the how.
My Lord,
Author of the whirlwind,
and the rainbow,
Co-author of death,
giver and taker of breath
(Yes, every knee must bow),
I understand it
now:
the why is not the how.
Le sporting-club de Monte Carlo
(for Lena Horne)
The lady is a tramp
a camp
a lamp
The lady is a sight
a might
a light
the lady devastated
an alley or two
reverberated through the valley
which leads to me, and you
the lady is the apple
of God’s eye:
He’s cool enough about it
but He tends to strut a little
when she passes by
the lady is a wonder
daughter of the thunder
smashing cages
legislating rages
with the voice of ages
singing us through.
Some days
(for Paula)
1
Some days worry
some days glad
some days
more than make you
mad.
Some days,
some days, more than
shine:
when you see what’s coming
on down the line!
2