Not my actual one – the one that I use in my work.
A combination of fear, doubt, grief, the weight of the world. I feel silenced and flummoxed and am trying to just listen, learn, and act. No one needs to hear what I have to say right now, but I can still spread the word of others.
Today, though, here’s a white man. Wendell Berry, a Kentuckian, even. This poem is for me, and, when he wrote it, also for himself, as a reminder of how to do this thing that, for me, in many ways, is as reflexive as breath.
We will someday come out of these things – pandemics, the clutch of systemic racism – and be, hopefully, better on the other side.
For now, here is a note to self for when I have more to say.
How to Be a Poet
(to remind myself)
i
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.
ii
Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.
iii
Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.
I am finding all sorts of beautiful and heartbreaking and hopeful voices in my travels these days. I am trying to moderate my intake of the interwebs, so I am simply posting without broadcasting.
Today’s poem, “For My People” by Margaret Walker, is presented here in two forms: the written form, as is usual, and above, the poem read by Leah Ward Sears, a justice in the Supreme Court of Atlanta, Georgia.
So many layers when you add another voice to the reading of this, especially this particular voice. The video above is more than just the poem; it’s also a bit about Sears’s life and why she chose this as her favorite poem. She is connected to this poem through her life as a child, and then again in her life’s work.
Please enjoy.
For My People
For my people everywhere singing their slave songs
repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues
and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an
unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an
unseen power;
For my people lending their strength to the years, to the
gone years and the now years and the maybe years,
washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending
hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching
dragging along never gaining never reaping never
knowing and never understanding;
For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama
backyards playing baptizing and preaching and doctor
and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking
and playhouse and concert and store and hair and Miss
Choomby and company;
For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn
to know the reasons why and the answers to and the
people who and the places where and the days when, in
memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we
were black and poor and small and different and nobody
cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood;
For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to
be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing and
play and drink their wine and religion and success, to
marry their playmates and bear children and then die
of consumption and anemia and lynching;
For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox
Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New
Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy
people filling the cabarets and taverns and other
people’s pockets needing bread and shoes and milk and
land and money and something—something all our own;
For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time
being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when
burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackled
and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures
who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;
For my people blundering and groping and floundering in
the dark of churches and schools and clubs and
societies, associations and councils and committees and
conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and
devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches,
preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by
false prophet and holy believer;
For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way
from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding,
trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people,
all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless
generations;
Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a
bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second
generation full of courage issue forth; let a people
loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of
healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing
in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs
be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now
rise and take control.
“I like it when a flower or a little tuft of grass grows through a crack in the concrete. It’s so fuckin’ heroic.” George Carlin
When will the state-sanctioned killing of black people in this country stop? What is it in the DNA of white people born in the U.S. that allows them to cast their eye away from the senseless killing of our neighbors, our friends? How can we keep looking away from this injustice, this extermination of black people?
We are headed towards revolution, and I know which side I am on. It scares the shit out of me to think on it, but I would die if it meant equality and justice for black people. If one of us isn’t free, then none of us are free.
I, Too
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—
As we all navigate what might turn out to be a brand-new world, it helps to go to the water, our place of origin, and to just listen to it meet the shore.
I don’t like to “interpret” a poem, as I feel there is more value in a person coming to it whole, without preconceptions. Please enjoy.
The Adjustments
When coffee first arrived in Europe,
It was referred to as “Arabian wine.”
In turn-of-the-century San Francisco,
The Bank of America began as the Bank of Italy.
When Cortés arrived at Tenochtitlán on November 8, 1519,
Moctezuma II greeted him warmly, and kissed his hand.
All of that. We are amazed by the smallest of things
Coming before us, the facts that seem so strange to us now
As we live in their opposite rooms.
In 1935, reports say, when Isaac Bashevis Singer
Arrived in New York, he was thirty years old
And could speak only three words in English:
“Take a chair.”
But then he learned other words. It helped.
Friends, this poem is incredible and timely. It almost made me cry, the last stanza, especially as we are in such an extraordinary time of avoiding human contact. I did not know Aracelis Girmay’s work before this poem, and now I want to know all of it.
Elegy
What to do with this knowledge that our living is not guaranteed?
Perhaps one day you touch the young branch
of something beautiful. & it grows & grows
despite your birthdays & the death certificate,
& it one day shades the heads of something beautiful
or makes itself useful to the nest. Walk out
of your house, then, believing in this.
Nothing else matters.
All above us is the touching
of strangers & parrots,
some of them human,
some of them not human.
Listen to me. I am telling you
a true thing. This is the only kingdom.
The kingdom of touching;
the touches of the disappearing, things.
