PART IV: VISIONS IN HISTORY This town’s edge, a collapsing shore, seems always to be where live the poor. In my mother’s time, they called us river rats,/ now the words mix insults/ of race, stones on our tongues we spit at others. * * * * * History’s latest […]
Among the rubble of our wounded nation the vibrant image of a lyric warrior haunts my fragile solitude, the canopy above his sleep after long years’ scribbling blank as silent centuries since departed. Plays and poems do not heal politics. A writer’s skyward reach, earthly guesswork’s intuition, gathers straw and […]
Banana Boat Moon And a hibiscus behind your ear like the exotically melancholy singer though you are a mad cap trickster who changes your birthday from hurricane time to June 11 on a spring whim in route to the place you claim to be born in it rolls off your […]
Why does being “unapologetically black” matter now? The Black Lives Matter movement put these words “unapologetically black” in motion through their written statements and the embodied signage of t-shirts, bags, and other body work. A Black Lives Matter t-shirt with the “nutritional facts” label for “Unapologetically Black” declares: “Serving Size: […]
PART I: Muheakantuck Much earlier, for some thousands of years, there lived here the Lenni Lenape people, “the true people,” thought to be the eldest and who were given deference among other Algonkian speaking peoples of the forest civilizations. They are the first settlers and hence the ancestors of all […]
From one many Many one Facts on ground Head in clouds More perfect, less perfect Imperfect, just perfect Less than we thought More to become No man’s land That is our land Sojourners on way To where we cannot say Don’t forget that caviar Is just fish eggs in a […]
I. 1859 “What to the Slave is the fourth of July?” asked Frederick Douglass the abolitionist prophet once enslaved who stole and then wrote himself free. Today I think Lonely. II. 2015 The hurricane has been down graded to a tropical storm but there is poetic justice despite the […]
Darkest Before Dawn?August 29, 2021
To Outwit HistoryAugust 29, 2021
“An act of survival and a strategy to heal:” Suné Woods Interview and PerformanceAugust 29, 2021
Dred Scott’s Blues: Three MeditationsAugust 29, 2021