Image Credit: Nicole Peyrafitte, KA Kingston JaunedOeuf (2020). Courtesy of the artist.
unbearable witness
i do not want to write these words_
escorted by flashing red and blue lights
the long white truck an enormous hearse
passes slowly down the street
through the neighborhood
no where to run or hide from its path
the stare of its headlights
a mark on each door in its wake_
shudder, moan, whisper a prayer
for all of us
dead
living
dying
seed
star
more…..
morning prayers in the eye of the storm
#1
give me five more minutes
before I have to wake up
into this nightmare day
#2
please
no more death today
no more death
#3
“god bless mommy and daddy
and gramps
and Robert and Trevor
and Aunt Edith
and everybody in the whole
wide world..” and god help us…
#4
seed
star
a prayer
health strength and
strawberries
for my mother
that we’ll hold each other again
in this life
kiss red tulips
the blacker the berry
and the beautiful ladies
in the beauty parlor
#5
child
of another apocalypse
continuing
I wake
pondering
the price of privilege
counting crossroads
and looking back
into the future. . .
civil wars
for June and Ethelbert
at the well heeled foot of the park where the wind roars around a traffic circle
in a nest of tall luxury apartment buildings the angels of death
flank the figures of free men and union soldiers in a tableaux of bronze sculptures
atop a war monument in the style of the arc de triomphe
a monument, the poet wrote, to an unfinished civil war. the men, freed
by their own hands from an apocalypse of four hundred years and continuing
a bloody baptism. the angels, the valkyrie, who ferried the best
and the bravest from killing fields to odun’s halls to join the deathless band
preparing to battle against the world’s imminent destruction in an upheaval of flame,
are those angels taking the black men to heaven?
the fire next time?
these days the streets are quiet until, noisy with ghosts, they are not. when push comes
to shove settlers break camp but the state still be smiting the brother down
mourning women wail across eternity from the stolen tombs of antiquity
and where are the lovers now?
where are the lovers now?
