Harlem (for
John Martin Green )
I am standing here on top of Mount Morris Park
like the captain of a defeated army, watching
my people, black people, people of African descent,
losing the Battle of Harlem, watching them
evacuated one by one, like wounded, bleeding
soldiers, bleeding in limb and mouth and memory,
like that stubborn couple in that great eviction scene
in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, that great masterpiece
of our history, the history of the invisibles of the USA.
Standing here, I am invisible. An invisible man?
Yes! But I am witnessing and testifying line by line,
with this hand trembling with rage and pain and sorrow
how Harlem is being auctioned block by block
to the highest bidder. Everything must go. Everybody!
Men, women and children. Every one is on sale.
The bulldozers are moving in. The caterpillars too,
And that large ball with which they knock down projects,
What is it called now? The Wrecking Ball! will knock
everything down including the Apollo. The Apollo?
Yes, the even the great Apollo will also have to go.
Every living trace of us, our black faces and asses,
Our smell and color will be erased and painted over
With white emulsion paint and efficient roller brushes.
We will watch entire neighbourhoods crushed
into splinters, and with the crash of each building, comes
crumbling into dust, every scrap of the memory
of our grandparents, parents, our childhoods, schools,
parks, benches, corners, cornershops, nightclubs,
how we grew up, the lives that we lived here in Harlem
The music we made, the paintings, the poetry, the dances.
Sing with me, Houston Baker, you who put knowledge
in my migrant heart, chant with me, you who know so well
the furrows of sorrow on the faces of the future?
Some rich Midas may buy, cash down, that house
where Langston Hughes once lived and died
and convert it into a condominium like the Taj Mahal
in Mo Better Blues where crack will be sold to the new
black and white wallstreet buppies of Harlem. Another star
of this new curfew may buy up Riverside Drive and relocate
Ralph Ellison’s widow from Apt 8D to the suburbs, leaving
behind, like broken furniture and cobwebs, the scent and memories
of the life they once lived in Harlem in that apartment overlooking
the Hudson. The river where it all started. These evacuations!
John-Martin Green, you may have to move again,
You the thrice removed. You may have to leave Harlem
to the high and mighty. Why? Because You can no longer
afford the rent! Besides who wants to be black sushi
for white sharks on an island cruised and rolled over
endlessly by the foam and laughter of unrelenting waves.
You must move again. Removed from Africa by your own
kith and kin. Removed from South Carolina where your
ancestors invented the ring shout amidst bales of cotton wool.
Removed from the Bronx where your father was a barber,
your illustrious mother a great singer. Your brother, a prince.
The barber’s shop where you learnt to sing is gone and
you will be removed to somewhere else in New York city,
exactly where I cannot say for now, the rent will tell.
This is your lot, John Martin Green, you who loved
this country so much that you wore its green fatigues
and crouched in ambush in a thousand forests against
foreign enemies and homemade foes, you will be removed
again into the final pages of the history of the invisible
in this great country, God’s own country, America, the beautiful.
So join me now, John Martin Green, join us also, Houston Baker,
you who taught me how to light a candle instead of cursing
the darkness. Join us now as we sing The Star Spangled Banner.
Tis of thee…Tis of thee...Tis of thee...Tis of thee... Tis of thee...
John Martin Green, as I write, I can feel a fog like a blanket
of darkness falling gradually, very gradually, over the United
States of Amnesia
Winston Salem (for Beverly J Robinson)
Beverly, I keep rewinding that scene
in The Color Purple where you appear
a black eagle among the yelling crowd. Picture? what crowd
I keep rewinding it just catch a glimpse
of that flash of your spirit which touched
every soul who knew your name and felt
the power that pulsed in your being.
Tall, elegant, gazelle of the savannah
you glide in that scene with ease and grace
as in life. I remember your smile and your sense
of humour when we shared that burger
in Winston Salem during the Black Theatre Festival
of 2000. North Carolina will be different this year.
There will be silences between our speeches
And the trees will remember our muffled tears
When the leaves begin to fall again in autumn
Because you are gone. Because you have passed.
Ostrich of the mountains. Egret of the plains.
St Louis (for Lisa Colbert)
In the cemetery where we laid you to rest
the hibiscus flowers still wave their petals
as they wail their song of grief and pain
for a life cut down so soon. In front of the church
were we held the funeral, the butterflies
we released into the air are still hovering
like the stanzas of this elegy and the drumbeats
that accompanied our procession to the graveyard.
In my heart, the sorrow marches on and on
like a stage army. How can I return to St Louis
when you are no longer there. What song
will I sing at your headstone? What new flowers
can I place like a pillow beneath your memory?
And where, in that forlorn city, will I spend the night?
Barbados (for Charla
Barker)
It is 12 midnight. I am sitting here, on the patio
of Room 110
of the Caribbee Beach Hotel, Hastings, Barbados,
listening to the Atlantic replaying, like an old
vinyl record,
the philosophy of the sea, on which the light from
an aeroplane
passing overhead falls like a brand new stylus.
It is hot. And the half empty bottle of Hennessey
I bought at the duty-free shop in Miami is not helping
things either.
My shirt is unbuttoned. I am sweating and thinking
of you.
What it would have felt like to have you here, at
this hour,
Your voice drowning out the old drooling gramophone
of the Sea
Your long, blonde hair falling on my shoulders like
the silk
in the wrist of the waves. Your fingertips and lips
running all over
my entire geography like that ship in the distance,
all lights on,
tracing the erogenous zones of this body of water,
this infinite ocean, the way history once ran over
this island
leaving it with only one lovesong: The desire
to be left alone by the West to complete its own
epic of love.
America (after
William Carlos Williams)
So much depends
On a big -buttocked, Caucasian, woman
spread-eagled on my waterbed,
as I write.
Her great white thighs ajar,
like monica lewinsky’s,
beckoning
at my exhausted bill clinton
which, sadly,
can no longer rise to the occasion.
America, I have given you all I have:
The entire contents of my loins!
I have given you everything!
There is nothing more left in my groins,
No fire, no fight, no force, no more fury!
I am talking to you, America,
You insatiable white whore who seduced me away from
my country
And abandoned me here, like the million homeless
souls
Swimming like blind spermatozoa
Along the streets of New York.
America, the woman who smiles with her thighs,
Listen to me. I am talking to you:
.
Look!
Il est finis!
Jazz
(for James Ndukaku Amanklulor)
Jazz, do you remember that Saturday
afternoon I came to Umuode with my friends
and relatives in a 504 Peugeot car
Loaded with yams, kolanuts,
a bottle of whisky, other ritual objects
and a goat, I think, to show you
my gratitude for the love and care
you showered on me at Nsukka
From 1979 to 1989 when I finally left Nigeria
To pursue my Ph.D. degree in Great Britain?
Do you or do you not? You made
an impromptu speech about my gifts
as an actor and my brilliance as a student
which, you insisted, singled me out and
attracted me to your tutelage. You sealed your
numerous encomiums with the Igbo proverb
about how the buzz of the mosquito’s wing
led to the thunderous slap on the thigh
“Anwuta bere nwi nwi nwi m sita kuo tai!”
Later on, I amused you and my entire entourage
by eating the delicious Uha soup your wife, Queen,
prepared and the pounded yam with both hands.
I rolled each white ball between both palms
before dipping it into the bowl, my fingers
foraging for fish like the jaws of a crocodile
scissoring the sea for fins or any living thing that drifts.
It is almost twenty years ago, yet your words
And the memory of that afternoon glistens
like the skin of a snake gliding across the road
leaving strange patterns on the ground
that reminds me of the hieroglyphics
of your blessings on my career
and your love for me forever as a father.
I am now tenured as a professor here in Athens, Ohio
And I have also been diagnosed with nasal pharyngeal
Cancer. I have received treatment and responded well
To both radiation and chemotherapy. We do not know
how things will turn out eventually. But lying on my sofa
this afternoon, and reading a book about Poetry and Love,
I suddenly thought of someone who has truly loved me.
And I remembered you. That is why I wrote this poem.
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