This is a free verse poem that was inspired by listening to “Somebody Blew Up America” by Amiri Baraka, with influence from other select works such as “Wise 1”. As Baraka has five children, I imagined one to be a son, a student who is in love with a white woman.
-miller
With Glasses Without Lenses:
Baraka’s Legacy or Nightmare?
dear father,
there was a power outage today
at university, universally
the moon masked the sun,
our student body dissolved
these leaders of tomorrow
so called so called
All invisible, indivisible, indistinguishable,
there were no
colours, no hues
spangled red white and blues
no tribes, no names, no sects –
nationless
the quivering lips of slurred words, impoverished
postulates could not and did not slay:
banyour omm bomm ba boom
no police, the political racquet –
deep breathing lingers,
enveloped in
still perfect darkness and i
didn’t speak, not that i couldn’t,
struck deaf and dumb just the same
the light never came
class was cancelled
so i, so i went to her apartment
which readily defies apartheid
and the tv movie of the week
weak, call my love ‘a jungle fever’?
but I don’t rape her like you say
the white man fears,
or any other blend
as she sends the blender whirling, the
smoothie, her scent enters my nostrils,
our open mouths tingle like strawberry
our eyes closed, and lips shall not lie
as we lay as we lay
at the back of the bus -
we were sitting there yeah, in that spot
love, of same
shame? Hardly.
our forefathers forsaken for closure
for renewal? for exposure?
Gross Injustice will not be denied!
with glasses without lenses
for my eyes do not deceive
staccato graffiti shades, tag claims
erupted from shackles and flames
and our children will not be ‘a breed’ as they
do not come from a kennel, they will be as
they are, we will be what we may
and may newark, be newly defined
NY for that matter, Why not?
a New York, State of mind?
and beyond! the blurblur auto
mobiles, spinning wheels, sign
languages, symbols, cosmopolitan rainbows
an ice cream shop with neopolitan swirls
people! people! people!
walk walk intermingle mesh merge
converge hushhhhh!!!!!!!!
i saw it in the rush so clearblurblur
WE
us, Us! U S, USA, US of A
letter to our ugly pasts
exhume with the exhaust fumes
care, gentle not to trip or slip
this is our stop, hands locked
upon a stone faced tower
a faceless clock, no tick nor tock
the clean breeze tickles,
my free hand smears
my warm wet face…
There is only
One race it’s
hueman, heyou and me and we man
as colour past, present conspired Did. does,
and future echoes, it goes:
don’t matter,
don’t matter, colour doesn’t matter,
don’t matter,
colour doesn’t mattaha, mattah, mata, mah…ah..ah…
bound and set free by a single word
which was unnamed, etched in a cave
huddled by embers of life’s first blaze
chanted and grunted in gut and utterance
shamed and murdered, hunted and gathered
before you and me
before history scrolled thick papyrus,
and encrusted etched cuneiform
or somber stories told, or a notion of what
dread the future may sing
of what dread as irony sits on civilization’s lap,
and i find more culture in the trash
than even the nicest rock
reminiscent of an age of naming
so many words i have become deaf to
foolish seems foolish and yet,
rather like the
p o w e r
outage / that serge,
which made that / pause,
which, for / a moment,
class was cancelled
and I weighed and considered
that word
that word
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