We named him Noah
Never dreaming his growth would
Concur with plague and pestilence
Streets running with blood and tears
While edifices trembled on their pedestals
Mother’s arms ache to hold back
A son unleashed upon this terrible world
That grants white male flesh magical powers
Mother’s heart bleeds for those others
Whose children are not issued such protection
Spread across the white coverlet
her bony length, the melds
she’s teaching us to make,
our knees stained knobs, skin
stretched on growing bone,
never still. Lowering light
moves among the heavy leaves,
shadowed. She’s fifty-nine
teaching us pinochle. The house
shelters a quiet of ticking clocks,
respite set like a rose in the glass,
the Peace she picked that morning.
I can’t help but remember
you, though you’ve been
gone for decades.
Thoughts of yesterday
run through my mind like
an old black & white rerun
on television. I see the past,
though fuzzy, but pray
for a brighter future.
You were never there
for the important things
in my life: band contests,
high school graduation,
the birth of your first
grandchild. On this day,
I’ll have to say, “I learned
from you.” I chose
a better path.
This umpteenth Juneteenth
passes for a celebration,
but we as a nation know
we are not free. These chains
of slavery still weigh like human
freight upon our furrowed brow.
An era so grotesque we know not how
to comprehend the vestige
of that sin against our common soul.
All I know to do is go from door
to door, hand out fliers to support
Booker for senator. A man
I’ve never met, but surely he
can bring a better future
than we’ve seen, surely he
must be a silver lining
in this year of quarantine.
That out of west Louisville,
just like the great Ali,
he could be the hero
in our desperate time of need.
That our nation’s angst
might boil, and this blood-
stained soil we call the USA
might for once and all be
cleansed of our intrinsic hatred,
that each door slammed on me
today might send a repercussion
through this nation, and that wave
will rise and Booker on the senate
floor will enact long overdue
and necessary
reparations.
a video call
in a nonexistent language.
does everything mean something?
wanton disregard for strunk.
drivel drivel drivel,
strunk strunk strunk.
words are cheap, dreams are free –
perhaps that’s why so many of them are ugly.
When words don’t fall like gentle drops of rain
to make the perfect sound on roofs of tin
then I must yearn instead until sun wanes
for just a glimpse of words that soar and sing.
Above the sheds, the barns, the roofs of tin,
they circle near, then veer in haste away
just like the flirting birds that soar and sing
that weave the sky with song, then stitch and braid.
In circling near they taunt, then veer away
these words whose sweetness never seems to wane —
words I so want to weave and stitch and braid
but in my hands they fade like drops of rain.
My transition in worlds going home
is like the turning of a great ship at sea
a realignment of the solar system,
the tilting of a planet
but I’m just going home.
I love you
with a painful kind
of love,
an ache that resonates
like a finger passing over an
old scar-
the flesh is numb,
and the memory sears.
I love you
with a forgiving kind
of love,
knotted tightly in my stomach,
making it impossible to relax in your presence,
like a punch
in the gut –
the flesh throbs
and the memory wounds.
I love you
with a sad kind
of love,
a permanent mourning,
like someone grieving,
forever trapped in a
funeral home –
the flesh wears black cloth,
and the memory darkens.
I love you, Dad,
with a complicated kind
of love.
But
I’ll take it.
to label children in schools
to label people on health documents
to label people on job applications
to label people?
