Scroll down to find a specific poet. (in chronological order of original posting):
Pat Jordan Dennis Brutus Adriana Scopino LisaAnn Lobasso Marilyn Thomas-King Rickey Laurentiis Robert Gibbons Ayla Jay Schoenwald Harry Newman Katherine Damigos chase berggrun Pat Jordan deAnna Harper Yael Flusberg Chris Brandt
Pat Jordan
DIRGE
So many mothers have walked this way Burdened with the flag of her son, her country, Holding her grief away from herself, Waiting to meet it at midnight hour.
Burdened with the flag of her son, her country, Holding tight to the contents of her heart, Waiting to meet it at midnight hour, A pilgrim in this silent maze of tombs.
Holding tight to the contents of her heart She feels her foot impose upon the grass, A pilgrim in this silent maze of tombs. The wonder is that stains can fade.
She feels her foot impose upon the grass Which does not know the world has stopped. The wonder is that stains can fade And dew will weep upon the grass
Which does not know the world has stopped. Holding her grief away from herself, The dew will weep upon the grass, So many mothers have walked this way.
(originally posted January 31, 2008)
To contact Pat Jordan send an email to pettypoet@bellsouth.net
Dennis Brutus
I must conjure from my past the dim and unavowed spectre of a slave, of a bound woman, whose bound figure pleads silently, and whose blood I must acknowledge in my own:
fanciful wraith? Imagining? Yet how can I reconcile my rebel blood and protest but by acknowldgement of that spectre's mute rebellious blood in me?
In sugarloaf, in the center of 102 acres, her twenty-three inch body watched trees grow, saw streams flow below the earth, heard wet sugar dripping from branches where whispering birds shot from waterfall to pine.
A poem, always has rape in it. Incest. Molestation crawling from the walls Anger scrawled in a dark place, in a poem.
When she turned, I didn’t answer her gurgle. Her white skin, pasting her body together, tightenedas she smiled. And I smiled. What is this? Everyone needs peace.
Yes,. from the fear in a hollow place, in a poem. Her syrupy body glimmers in the daylight. Her eyes glaze over as the fog creeps around her cheekswhining red. She licks my nose, nodding her football head when Ilaugh. Her small hands clasp my hair, ripping it. I stare at her lightbulb body. How could anyone not love her body? How could any man love her body? She is my baby, my daughter dripping sweet from her mouth like sap from leaves. Her eyes are blue-grey like the pewter sky.
I don’t doubt for a minute that she loves her life. Her grandfather blasts Gatorade cans off fallen logs whereI spot deer tracks. Her grandmother wipes her diamond chin as white slop flows like a river. Why can’t life be like the forest, she crinkles her question, her forehead growing old like hermother. I flatten my face in the icy creek that dries up in seconds. The trees fall. Birds boomerang into oak trunks and crash to the sadearth.
I am still mesmerized by her body, its picturesque innocence dripping sweet square sugarloaf, I almost cannot hear the roar of the monster eating themountain filled with rape, incest molestation in the dark silent squirrel holes.
Why is all of this so beautiful? Looking out my project window sixteenth floor I watch the birds race with the dawn, like to think they circle the globe to keep pace with the sun as it rises, continuously, from sleep.
Listen to them talk among themselves.
A number 2 train pulls in on Jackson Avenue going uptown, a number 5 train going toward Manhattan, people beginning their day. My washing machine works its magic. Brownstone sings in harmony: “Ooh la la la.”
I grew up here, “Project Lady of the South Bronx.”
Soft colors this time of morning Cars onthe Bruckner Expressway, moving in uncrowded harmony. Trucks deliver groceries, clothing, liquor, toothpaste to the shops on 3rd Avenue A man collects bottles and cans (got to find enough so he can eat today). Notice how that abandoned building is not so scary as it seems in darkness.
Another sea gull flies past my window "Goodmorning," we both nod. Sunshine brightens to daytime yellow. "Good morning" St. Mary's, McKinley, Moore, John Adams, Forrest, Mott Haven, Melrose and Millbrook Projects
Why is all of this so beautiful? A question I have often pondered as Iwatch the sunrise from my mansion's window.
Yellowed. Blades of grass bent beneath the sole, against the river mud of colors matching coal: fragments of the past. Now. Scattered salt on the floor. These eyes are beady pepper-grains, searching— more and more.
ii clouds
off rooftops
mother says
stretch
to steal a bite
of gray...
iii sirens
Lean your head against my ear and you’re to hear the gathered
crowds at Convention drive: Pulitzer gold upon their eyes; bacteria
bites back their bloodied nails: we’ll peel your face and hope to find marrowbones.
Pink. Pale.
ivfaces
if you would, find my gray face that i left beneath the mississippi mud
digging with broken nails (& my red face padded with the alabama clay) deeper, somewhere;
& my brown face, combing the surface of the rising waters: blue-black and glazed with the humid, the august sun.
The long road to destiny is filled with peril and shock Saul changed his name to Paul, Walking a Damascus road to persecute Christians, He was struck by alight Light is here, it is internal It shines, though sometimes we feel dimmed There are things one must experience and see Odysseus had to god own into Hades to see his mother Margaret Atwood communes with the dead The spirits of ourancestors are always around Charles Lwanga the little boy from Uganda Refused to doubt himself Though he came from the bush The king wanted no prayer in the royal court Lwanga prayed religiously He was burned alive for what he believed. Martyrdom isinevitable in some of our destinies Nomusa had 32 brothers and sisters She had to prove toher father She was worthy enoughto go on the great elephant hunt. Yet, we must seek the truth, Deep mysteries, subterfuge realities So that they may rise like jeweled spires Booker T. knew that road As he walked into destiny Martin’s destiny, Malcolm’s destiny, As Malcolm swam the historic Zam-Zam River Swimming allows us touse our entire body We must use our entire body like a human instrument The African Proverb,“pray on your feet.” I don’t think Fannie Lou Hamer Knew her words would walk into destiny when she said, “I am tired and sick of being tired.” Or Rosa, but not only did she walk into destiny She sat in it, she was manacled to it. That road, that road, All roads do not lead to Rome The church building has failed Though architecture, barrelled ceiling, baptisteries, Doric columns are beautiful Beauty fades likeVirginia sandstone The church must address destiny John Locke said,“Everything is in a flux.” We must keep flowing. When it comes down to pain, Misery, hysteria, poverty, psychosis, Color does not matter When it comes to survival Blood, liver, diabetes, HIV, crack Color does not matter That road, that road, To destiny Walk that road Your own road, Make it yours Walk it fully, that road, Color will not help you on that road Jim knew he needed Huck to survive That is why Martin said, “Black man and white man Jew and Gentile Protestant and Catholic” Because color does not matter That road is only for the strong We must see what our ancestors saw Beyond the physical, the spiritual, Even the metaphysical Martin said, “I have been to the mountaintop and I have seen the promised land.” The mountaintop is an elevation, A rampart It is a mental uplift It is singing your way out of pain, It is I dream a world It is I wander as I wonder It is wounded in the house of a friend It is still I’ll rise It is my grandma It is the gospel in my throat. It is the sanctity of this poem. It is that long road to destiny.
(Originally posted February 15, 2008) To contact Robert Gibbons send an email to: robertgibbons54@gmail.com
Ayla Jay Schoenwald
WALLS
Today, Everyone is bulidings walls to set in stone and cement the illegitimate ownership of stolen land Israel, Palestine Phalasteen U.S., Mexico Aztlan until each brick in the wall is another moment lost another life uprooted tree taken tear shed each brick in the wall is a step closer to separate which pretends seperate is safety and right.
But Assata Shakur once wrote that a wall is just a wall and can be broken down She never told us how,
Instead the walls grow taller watered with human blood and fertilized with the rhetoric of fear and lies culminating in a harvest of death and loss. or maybe not.
Perhaps it is possible to permeate permanence, tear down terror break down walls.
Perhaps maybe possible Perhaps it may be possible It may be, this maybe I think is what I’ve heard called hope.
soon the generals will have their way and killing will begin again the modern kind distant and televised how strange it is to think of movies instead of slaughter when the images come the ones we’ve seen now so many times: bombs falling missiles skimming over suburbs so much like our own we have grown so fat with violence we need our murder super-sized before we can feel it and the smaller deaths the ones on the ground the cameras won’t see will never be counted
Some grow into ourselves late in life, flowering near frost, giving up our supposed calling to find our soul which we had feared to be a thing of myth.
Wearing the mantle like new Easter clothes, we feel obligated to gather grains of sand to form a pebble to fling across the sky. Once a poem is airborne, stone becomes spaceship aiming for an undiscovered planet, the cloak falls gentler about the shoulder, and we ponder why it hung in the closet so long unworn.
WAITING OUTSIDE THE U.S. CAPITOL WHERE SHE LIES IN STATE The only tired I was, was tired of giving in. Rosa Parks
after the first three hours the temperature dropped to visible breath. my fall coat no longer protected and my toes went numb so i tried to transcend time by thumbing a rose quartz bracelet each bead proof of my will to persist, and i finally got why mom always said standing appels* for hours was a worse sentence than the death of her childhood.
in the muddy field where thousands of souls made solitary by the cold snaked around a makeshift fence, i found a handful of warmth, a single ruby glove.
i practiced standing meditation following the ringing in my ears to keep my mind from wondering why i was on this line, not in my down-covered bed when i’d see the coffin just as well in the newspaper in the morning. each time i lifted my sole i knew i was one step closer to the dome with 108 windows like a rosary i could pray with my eyes.
it was dawn when i finally circulated once around the ceremonial space then down to the crypt below where i begged that her being where she was would bless where she was laying – and all of us who’ll never have moments like hers on the bus will still find something worth standing up for.
---------------------------------------------- * In the Nazi concentration camps, inmates had to stand appels – a protracted roll call – twice a day regardless of weather or exhaustion. Some gave birth to babies buried on the spot. Many others dropped dead during the hours-long appels or were killed if they couldn’t maintain an erect posture.
(Originally posted April 27, 2008)
To contact Yael Flusberg send an email to: Yael36@aol.com
Chris Brandt
IN THE LOCKER ROOM THE MALE GODS EXAMINE
their penises with care. They are transfixed also by their mirrored pecs, lats, abs, but mostly they look down at their dicks.
Is this the essence of divine behavior? Their bodies for the mirror, they watch themsculpt themselves, but their penises are personal - they probe out into the unknown - a singlegulp
and down some waiting gullet, seed claimed and gods discarded. This secret suspicion urges them to inspect, unguarded,
hairs, follicles, veins, moles, mottledskin, wrinkled sacs? - this is why, perhaps, the world's a mess? Instead of taking care of business, the godsare staring at their laps.
