FOR MY GRANDCHILDREN COMING OF AGEIN THEIR TIME OF CIVIL RIGHTS
For K, J, L, B, S, J
This didn't start with stamps.It goes way back.FragmentsTrace Elementspoems
"All artists, if they are to survive, must tell the whole story."James BaldwinNobody Knows My Name
When I get the bluesI listen to Miles AheadDon't take anybody else's James Baldwin,read him yourself.Recognize the voice of Bessie Smithwhere ever you find yourself.Gpa.
ONE DAY IN SCHOOL, YOU’LL NEED
TO MAKE A REPORT ON DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
—for Josh and KatieAnd for Sammie and Deanna(who weren’t born yet.)
You can start to look at this book then.You don’t have to read it.Just look at a few pictures.Read a couple of captions underneath
the photos that interest you.You can make your report from lookingat the pictures. Ask your Mom & Dadwhy these words, civil rights
are so important, still. Make themgive you a good answer, too.You don’t have to read the book. Not yet.You can take it to school, maybe,
to show your teacher and your friendsthat your grandpa got you the biggest book
when I was a baby? Who is Taylor Branchwho wrote my name in the book?One day you’ll want to know what all thishas to do with you. Pick it up, then.
Look at the photo of Mrs. Rosa Parks,and Bob Moses, too. Check their namesin the index. See those overalls he’s wearing?You can tell your friends that was the uniform
of civil rights workers. You need to knowabout Medgar Evars, too. You’ll knowwhen it’s time to pick up the bookand read it on your own. Nobody
will have to tell you. Dr. Kingled the marches for freedom.Young people just like yourselveswere warriors pushing him from behind.
One day you’ll need this story.And one day the story will need you too.This is a big book about freedomThat’s why Grandpa got you this book.
Love, Grandpa JimFebruary 25, 2007
*
PUNCHING MY TICKET
…but ferociously literate
Harlem Renaissance Stampsarrive for my grandkids.I'm carried away by the faceof Anne Spencerand give away books I want back now,
books I've made ragged over 50 years.It's the 4th of July during the American plague.We're looking at polished stonesbrought back from the beacheating cherry pie, and I say,
Kate, those books, can I have one back?The one with the names of poetson the cover in green. I showed youMari Evans (There's plenty in thereto fill you up) and George Hector,
the emancipated turtle who talks--Katie I wore that book outbut I'm still beginning,James Baldwin was a preacherat 14, your age, in Harlem,
Jimmy called Orilla Miller, Bill,his teacher at P.S. 24. She took himto plays. At Frederick Douglassjunior high his teacher was Countee Cullen,To make a poet black and bid him sing!
He's got eight pages in that book.OK. I'm talking too much,will you get that book, nowthat awful brain of Godcalls up our memory again.
Jim Bodeen7 July 2020
THREE CUPS, CREAM AND SUGAR
Love, Jim
The painter, Rex DeLoney
asks only one thing,
gifting the painting: Make A Space
for A Love Supreme, for his John Coltrane:
READING LETTERS FROM THE VIET NAM WAR
LOOKING AT THE ANNE SPENCER FOREVER STAMP
ONE OF FOUR HARLEM RENAISSANCE PORTRAITS,
A LETTER, WHILE READING HER POEMS
DURING THE SUMMER OF HER STAMP: 2020
Dear Mrs. Spencer,
Paths in your garden cover you like a shawl.
Forever is more than a stamp, Mrs. Spencer.
Marked, a vow, another word for Heaven.
The company you keep. Dr. W.E.B. Dubois.
Your chapter of the NAACP.
Those in the room listening to you read poems.
I've not found your recorded voice,
but from my garden, I'm looking into yours.
This stamp, with your portrait in light,
eyes coming from shadow marks
in tree pathways, full sun
on nose and cheeks to chin
contrasted red lips dappled in shade
bringing out the certain particulars in your poems.
Not quite a full smile. A golden leaf
illustrating your left cheek,
a full curl of your hair on the right side
of your forehead. I gave my grand daughter
your poems in Negro Poetry, and had
to go online to locate Letter to My Sister,
Paths in your garden wind into Edankraal.
Ed and Anne gathered, corralled.
Radically open conversation in time, just now--
Just now. Another one. Another.
From your one-room garden studio,
bringing the world to your side.
Your garden's been rebuilt.
I write you from a stone garden in Yakima.
Ancient river stones, carved by water,
altar-elevated, where I listen from.
This morning, riding my bicycle,
I'm thinking of you again,
again in your garden, imagining
you greeting others who garden,
who write poems, who build conversations
surrounded by flowers. The justness
of talk, surprises of who shows up
even danger in safe places.
What is sorrow but tenderness now.
Your garden is Gethsemane for others, too.
Your grace for us in your poems.
Sitting on a stone under a Japanese Maple
I imagine myself quiet on a side path, listening
as people wonder if perhaps you're greeting today.
Yusef Komunyakaa has been here.
Your garden, now a public trust.
Your poems on cards. Yusef brought
Ota Benga, from the equatorial forests
near Kasai River. Yusef freed him
in a poem, and the two of you sit together,
enduring. A pound of salt and bolt of cloth
quilted and beauty-stained.
You are holding Ota Benga in your arms
which are the eternal and forever lines of Yusef's poem.
You live in a garden where all gets said
each knowing all the other brings and holds.
Jim Bodeen
June-August 2020
SHE HAD TOLD THE WRONG MAN
AND SHE WAS THE BEAUTIFUL WOMAN
ON THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE STAMP:
A NOVELIST, HER NAME IS NELLA LARSEN
Quicksand beauty describes herself
and she's with Langston, too,
and Langston knows, yes he does, Langston knows.
She is the book woman
in a black church listening
to the white preacher.
She is quicksand, not liked
because she can't conform.
Even her lover distances himself.
And she does like the feel of silk on skin.
The one who has no home knows
and carries dark threads
in the soiled fabric as traceable shops.
Whirling leaves twisting during worship
and she can hear the tom-toms
if she can't see them. Give it up.
Gave it up. It would be useless
to tell and to tell is the cost of assurance.
Calm, cool girl bearing the courageous,
a beginning in luster itself.
Isn't she the dancing unicorn.
Larsen watches because she can
what's going on and how to see it
She participates, but she's outside of all
even entertained
she could be lost or saved
any moment failing to obliterate
glamour entices beyond alcohol
left with civility's hangover
hanging on to things and travel
hadn't it been enough of too much
One who knows quicksand
retains the sound of sea in her ear
O Pregnancy! O Pastoral Mercies!
(Please God, release her from the smells of the kitchen.)
(From cleaning house.)
O Sabioah!
(Spell her!) (Spell her!)
Past pleasant life gone
Reverend Mr. Pleasant Green!
She took it all the way until she could say
I have ruined my life to kingdom come
and into the next of all beyond
ruined my beauty too to come home to you
Not to be born, not to be carried
Not again no not no
born again for me
She had she had she had
told it to the wrong man
In passing the outward appearance
is noted on the envelope
it could have been in the travel
the envelope itself never opened
Jim Bodeen
24-31 July 2020
A NOD TOWARDS KEN BLACKERBY
ON THE JAMES WRIGHT RIVER
WRITING POEMS DURING A PROPHETIC TIME
Right about the time my son
discovered alcohol he brought home
a dog named Trouble. At the time
John Lewis was the furthest man
from my mind. Young men
like their music loud.
There's always an adult in the room,
even at SNCC headquarters
back in the day. Tone it down,
John. How could one know
that dog would be good trouble?
How could we know what
was still to come would require
sobriety none of us believed in or imagined.
Jim Bodeen
4 August 2020
SUITE FOR ANTHONY HEILBUT
more shoveling,
FROM THE BOB MOSES
POEMS
Walking the living room,
I know, I've been here before.
Walking the yard, watching
buds burst in dis-belief--
bonsai firs, collected
from the wild. But back
to Bob Moses. In 1976,
he returned to the States
after ten years in exile.
Work built around voting,
not sit-ins. Robert Parris
when his name set fires.
Jesus of the whole project.
The tree planted by water.
Your 8th grade algebra teacher.
Jim Bodeen
12 April 2017
BEGIN AGAIN, HE SAYS, IN THE AFTER TIME
Begin Again:
James Baldwin's America
And Its Urgent Lessons For Our Own
--Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
Backward letters on a shower curtain
tells a story about asylum seekers,
scheduled deportation flights,
No Están Solo, no you're not--
No We're Not. Here's a post card
poem written to a Poetry Pole,
hand-stamped at the post office,
Professor Glaude, grateful for your all,
how much do I love what you say
about Coltrane's Pursuance,
your insight a sustaining epiphany.
A love supreme. Racial philanthropists,
Ouch! No name connecting
with Emerson. But what
a way to Whitman! The After Times.
Your walk to the abyss
into yourself. Your Dad,
thanks again, road trip
in and out of Montgomery.
Lucky students facing courage.
Highway 65. Jimmy was right.
The evasion, the evasion.
This note before ICE flight
witness, Yakima, 60 minutes.
Jim Bodeen
31 July--8 September 2020
*
BELATED THANK YOU LETTER TO W.E.B. DUBOIS
WHILE READING THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA EDITION, DUBOIS: WRITINGS,
THE SUPPRESSION OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE,
THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK, DUSK OF DAWN & ESSAYS,
AFTER 25 MAY 2020[i], AND THROUGH SUMMER AND FALL OF 2020
High in the tower where I sit above the loud complaining of the human sea, I know many souls that toss and whirl and pass, none there are that intrigue me more than the Souls of White Folk. Of them I am singularly clairvoyant. I see in and through them…Not as a foreigner do I come, for I am native…I see these souls undressed and from the back and side. I see the working of their entrails. I know their thoughts and they know that I know.
W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of White Folk, Darkwater, 1920
Leaving, then, the world of the white man, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses,--the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls…Before each chapter…stands a bar of the Sorrow Songs,--some echo of haunting melody from the only American music which welled up from black souls in the dark past. And, finally, need I add that I who speak here am bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the Veil?
W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, Atlanta, Ga., Feb
1, 1903
Dear Dr. DuBois,
Anne Spencer’s on the new Harlem Renaissance stamp! I don’t need to be stepping on flowers in her garden at the reception, but can’t stop imagining the look on your face receiving the mail with her smile on the envelope. I’d love to find a photo of you from her writing cottage, Edankraal, listening to her poems. The price of stamps has gone up. You’re on two already. The Postal Service issued a 29-cent DuBois stamp in 1992 as part of its Black Heritage Series; and again in 1997, unveiling, (their word, they know not what they say) a 32-cent stamp honoring you as a civil rights pioneer. You’re sitting with your typewriter. You never went empty. Thank you for every word. Commemorative Stamps inspire, Dr. DuBois, but my hope in this letter is to say something of what Souls of Black Folk has meant to me over the past 50 years (I’m 75), and not write about stamps, wonderful as they are, and now here I am standing before the Post Office—O!—
Dr. DuBois, we’re in such a—
Nothing’s unveiled. Nothing. The veil.
Republicans are pulling out sorting machines at the post office,
Suppressing ballots not slavery, the election in six days.
Mailing ballots clogged, grinds each woman and man.
I used to teach, have a classroom.
The fly. Souls of white folk.
Atlanta and the 100 hills.
Your chronology and the dizziness it brings.
I didn’t want to talk about Washington,
Your well-known prophesies.
What, in God’s
name, am I on earth for?[ii]
Not Dudley Randall’s poem carrying me decades
None of the indelible beauty.
This is a war cry, warrior DuBois,
And you are the word behind
Black Lives Matter.
If I had a classroom today,
All my students would you write letters.
We’d start with the post office, telling you everything.
They told us to get out with our masks.
The poem in the garden, the chronology From here.
A new saint your way. George Floyd, Look for him.
You taught us caste too. Isabel Wilkerson
Took off with it: Caste of Our Discontent.
Another of your words making a comeback.
In the Vice-Presidential Debate
Between Democratic Senator Kamala Harris
And Vice-President Mike Pence,
(Kamala graduated from Howard),
A fly lands on the Vice-President’s head
And he doesn’t brush it off.
Call this Parable of the Fly Reborn.
I am underlining again reading (Yes I am!)
Souls of Black Folk, and that fly
Kept us going for a week.
A little blue fly
is trying to cross the yawning keyhole.
Oh Bishop Onderdonk![iii] You too live again!—thriving
In the well-tempered skin of Mike Pence.
Shoo fly, shoe fly, feelers in his clipped protestant hair.
Have they all felt their Valley of Humiliation?
Your Alexander Crummell lives where he stands
Refusing entry under such terms.
Souls of Black Folk. But beautiful.
How laughter is food from Jesus.
Your long walk, your steady resistance,
Warns against word count and remembrance,
Requiring a march and not a parade,
Your breath planting free schools,
Your pen insistent, praising Freedmen’s Bureau,
Naming Edmund Ware, Samuel Armstrong,
So much faith in men! Unwritten history.
This one, Dr. DuBois:
I taught school in
the hills of Tennessee.
Out of Fisk, beginning the hunt for a school—
Got a teacher? Yes. So I walked on and on—
Horses were expensive. You found one.
You stayed in homes longing to know,
Knowing doubts of old folks.
Your two years in country schools
Makes Robert Moses[iv] possible,
Puts algebra alongside the vote.
*
Sorrow songs rise above all defining prayer.
Most beautiful expression of human experience.
It takes courage to leave the porch
And if you want to ride with our teacher
the Jim Crow door’s open.
Born in 1868, you start high school in 1880,
Become a saint at 95, a citizen of Ghana.
In 1963. I am 17, hearing your name for the first time.
Your Library of America writings count 1334 pages.
This letter. You’re not laughing in your essays,
But what on earth is whiteness that one should desire it?
Suppression returns. Your early call for suppression of slave trade.
Today it’s suppression of the vote and we follow you,
And it
shall mean the triumph
Of the good, the beautiful and the true.
*
Two friends here, Gilbert and Phil[v] won’t let me close
With a handshake. Dr. Dubois, we’ve been socially distanced
By another plague, and give air-hugs and elbow bumps.
I’m reading about your grandson, Arthur McFarlane II.
He’s got his own Ph.D in public health.
I’m looking at the picture of the two of you.
You’re 90. He’s two months.
Your birthday party in New York,
You’re guest of honor. Your grandson’s given your words,
You will soon learn, my dear young man…
That famous one addressed to you, ending,
Learn what you want to do, how you are fit to do it…
And Sharee Silerio lives with history, too,
Writes in THE Root how your grandson works
To re-distribute what’s here, with homelessness, food insecurity.
Here’s more. He knows your talented tenth.
…those ten were
supposed to be of service to the people,
…that piece of the
puzzle is what I’ve taken
As being my part
keeping grandpa’s legacy alive.
I think that a big part
of how I became myself.
People relate to
his double consciousness,
To what grandpa
says.
*
Writing to grandkids. What else to do?
Your grandson finds his voice in you.
Hand carrying letters, walking.
Jim Bodeen
Storypath/Cuentocamino
Yakima, WA
October, 2020
[i] George Floyd is murdered in Minneapolis by a policeman on this day.
[ii] DuBois, citing Alexander Crummell, who refused the veil, writing in Souls of Black Folk.
[iii] See Chapter XII, Souls of Black Folk, Of Alexander Crummell.
[iv] Robert Moses went on to teach Algebra in the South, insisting on quality education for Black students.
[v] Gilbert Chandler & Phil Pleasant, Yakima. Chandler took me into Black Ancestors to document their stories. Phil was famous for neckbones and his mantra, Don’t give me no handshake!
*
THE SINGING CARPENTER
—for the
students of A.C. Davis High School
And the children of Pastor Everhart
Baptist preacher who lifted my voice
Pastor John Edward Everhart, 79,
Yakima, where he sang to us each year
During Black History Month
transitioned to the welcoming arms
of the Lord our God on March 28, 2020.
We’d take our classes to the auditorium
Where he was backed by angels—
The Aeolian Choire and he’s talk to us,
Tell us his story, tell us
How it was—he finished
High school in the army—
Chaplain’s assistant, 20 —
Served in Vietnam—we
Never talked about it—and
How it is, too—he’d be preaching
To us, really, Texas born,
Married in North Carolina,
And then, my God! How
He did it, he’d be right there
In between talk and song
Maybe the change in mid-word,
Harmonies—by the time he hit
Liberty it was there,
High as the listening skies,
The Aeolians would kick in,
Beckoning with their arms,
More than two decades
We did this, there was a piano
Too, where would it come from,
And drums, Full
of the faith,
Full of the hope, and we
Wouldn’t get every word
But carried by students next to us
Even in the balcony, where the air
Was thin, everybody singing—
Thy hand true, true to our native land—
He came from Mt. Hope,
He came from Pilgrim’s Rest,
He came to us all of us
Young and young again
In the public city school
Where his children
Would hear their father sing
Jim Bodeen
20 November 2020
A SUITE FOR JAMES WELDON JOHNSON
BY JIM BODEEN
SUMMER AND FALL, 2020
There is a wide, wide wonder in it all
James Weldon Johnson
—But…beautiful, like kissed tears, she said…
But if I could tell you, you’d listen?
Geoff
Dyer
FROM TUESDAY TO TUESDAY, NOVEMBER, 2020,
AND FROM SUNDAY TO SUNDAY, TOO,
FROM THE WRITINGS OF JAMES WELDON JOHNSON,
BY WAY OF ACKNOWLEDGING HIS WAVING FORWARD WORD
And for poets from Phyllis Wheatley to Joshua Henry Jones, Jr.,
All included in The Book of American Negro Poetry,
Edited by James Weldon Johnson, 1922
Six feet from Woodrow Wilson,
James Weldon Johnson, a portrait study
Looking for awareness, Looking
For traces of Corporal Baltimore,
Social distancing we’d call it, today,
Our pandemic-plague-time veiled.
Along this way, but beautiful.
Lift every voice, and sing—
You and your brother riffing
Anecdotes. Anonymous.
Entering the culture from this
Side to save one’s own skin—
Aframerican hope. This, the laundry
Bag where I keep my notebook
In the Pullman car, my artist-friend’s
Dad with his eye-out on the dream
Train. So many anthologies now,
Thick, burdensome, I count three essential:
Yours from 1922, Bontemps’ American Negro Poetry,
1963—and one come later, in-between,
Michael Harper’s—Michaeltree Songline
Pedigree family-blues poet’s 200 Years—
Vision, struggle, power, beauty & triumph,
With Anthony Walton. Quatrains full
With digression, errantry, broken away,
Pull of Black poets, follow-me-prophetic
Jesus-like. From origins, soul-making.
Walkabout like this. Your anthology first,
But I came of age (coming home from war),
Finding you inside Bontemps’ who opens
His books with you: O Black and Unknown Bards:
How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?—
‘Wide wonder in it all’—alongside
Go Down Death (A Funeral Sermon)—
Death didn’t frighten Sister Caroline—
Bontemps (along with music) would carry,
Direct me, over four decades.
Your inclusion of Paul Lawrence Dunbar,
Jump back, honey, jump back.—poor
Was the loan—go forth, Claude McKay says,
Black of that Black
land where black deeds are done—
Anne Spencer, now on a new American stamp,
…a quivering female thing/gesturing assignations—
And young Fenton Johnson’s Children of the Sun—
Weaving, waiting, reared, embossed—in splendor—
His nouns and verbs living still under your cover.
Mine, a thank you crossing 100 years of living poems.
Hand carried from Johnson, Harper, Bontemps,
Breathing, turning poisoned air to oxygen.
Your book carried us, lifted us, like the hymn
You and your brother J. Rosamond Johnson
Created from anecdote, pressured by time.
*
WHEN I WAS NO
LONGER WHO I WAS
1 September 1961—Moore
Theater—Seattle
RAY CHARLES
I got my
driver’s license the day
I turned 16 on the 9th of August—
But I wasn’t at the Moore—I found
The Eagles Ballroom at 7th and
Union
The night before—
It was a dance, a dance hall, and I was all
eyes—
Knowing
about it before I knew what it was
The only
living boy from Dakota in the room
Unsure of the
clutch in my father’s Plymouth
Never having
been alone on Seattle’s
Downtown
streets stopped
At a red
light pointed at the moon
I wouldn’t
know it then
Did I see
the song or hear it
What’d I say
I wouldn’t
Know it but
I had found it
—this way—
And found
myself in the song
And the song
was a poem
And you don’t
know me
Poem and
song the same thing
And it would
be enough and deeper
And more
true and coming from proof
In my
scrapbooks precursors
It brings a
tear clutch and double clutch
Careless
love you don’t know the one
And what was
so clear
And laid out
before me would never
Veer this
straight swing home
Jim Bodeen
30 November—7 December 2020
*
THE SINGING CARPENTER
—for the
students of A.C. Davis High School
And the children of Pastor Everhart
Baptist preacher who lifted us
My voice and yours,
Pastor John Edward Everhart, 79,
Yakima, where he sang to us each year
During Black History Month
Transitioned to the welcoming arms
Of the Lord our God on March 28, 2020.
We’d take our classes to the auditorium
Where he was backed by angels—
The Aeolian Choir and he’d talk to us,
Tell us his story, tell us
How it was—he finished
High school in the army—
Chaplain’s assistant, 20 —
Served in Vietnam—we
Never talked about it—and
How it is, too—he’d be preaching
To us, really, Texas born,
Married in North Carolina,
And then, my God! How
He did it, he’d be right there
In between talk and song
Maybe the change in mid-word,
Harmonies—by the time he hit
Liberty it was there,
High as the listening skies,
The Aeolians would kick in,
Beckoning with their arms,
More than two decades
We did this, there was a piano
Too, where would it come from,
And drums, Full
of the faith,
Full of the hope, and we
Wouldn’t get every word
But carried by students next to us
Even in the balcony, where the air
Was thin, everybody singing—
Thy hand true, true to our native land—
He came from Mt. Hope,
He came from Pilgrim’s Rest,
He came to us all of us
Young and young again
In the public city school
Where his children
Would hear their father sing
Jim Bodeen
20 November 2020
*
—BUT
BEFORE THEN,
a poor town boy
from the country of wheat fields
closer to Canada
than the United States of America
his parents left the wheat fields
and the grain elevator
staying close to railroad tracks
to the West Coast and city life
the time of Elvis Presley
he’s carrying newspapers
a 14-year old paper boy
on his bicycle—it’s as simple
as this—he hears
the music of Ray Charles
Before they left the country
He listened to baseball game
With his mother
In the farm kitchen
From baseball cards
He knew Mickey Mantle
And Willie Mays
He knew what was happening
From these cards
He knew Elston Howard
*
Where the bright
gleam of our bright star is cast—
This, that day of collapsing distance
With President Wilson—Fighting
Southern oligarchy, for national citizenship
With deep distrust of Wilson in 1916.
1917 comes to East St. Louis and Houston.
Speaking to Wilson against shooting
And lynching, after writing about the baby
Baptized in gasoline, who has a word
For you, elected NAACP Secretary
Standing to speak? 13 new NAACP
Branches, 1917 horrors destroying
What can be remembered in time.
Corporal Charles Baltimore of the 24th Infantry
Going to check on Alonso Edwards,
Black soldier who was pistol-whipped
And arrested, after coming to the rescue
Of a Black woman pulled into the street
In her nightgown while her five children watch.
Leader of 10,000 people Silent March--
Newspapers show and tell of the lynching
And Private Frank Johnson breaking into gospel,
Lord, I’m coming home, 12 other soldiers joined
In song. In East St. Louis, white mobs massacre
Blacks protesting black workers from the South
Taking industrial jobs from them. 27 murders found,
Houses, bodies, neighborhood burned—this is the news
On the 4th of July, 1917. Jim Crow Justice.
*
We come as a delegation from the New York Branch
Of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,
Johnson says to President
Wilson, standing, And now,
Mr. President, we would not let this opportunity pass…
*
100 YEARS OF A SOUL-MAKING
CHAIN
For B.G,
exhortation, & the critical moment
Three anthologies
Linking each other threaded
Dark duende matter
Sounding soul singing
Johnson-Harper-Bontemps
Dry paper ink breath
1917
Soldiers in East St. Louis
Six feet chain-distanced
A murmuration
Confuse predators, stay
warm
Dry streams declaring
Jim
*
The Book of
American Negro Poetry
Come to us in a mean time—1922—
1922—Thanking you at Thanksgiving,
Mr. Johnson, 100 years later. You’ve been
Working with NAACP and Congress
For three years on the Anti-Lynching Bill,
The Dyer bill, finally passed by House
In 1922—Senators will filibuster,
But the poems, still in print—
I’m reading now A
Song of Thanks,
By Edward Smyth Jones,
For the pumpkin
sweet and the yellow yam
For the corn and
beans and the sugared ham—
Jones lives too in the Index of Authors, telling
How he walked 100s of miles from the South
To Harvard, arrested for vagrancy. His poem,
Harvard Square gets him out of jail. So it is,
With poems, Mr. Johnson, this book in my hands.
The anti-lynching bill will be looked at again.
It, too, well, another poem, George Marion McClellon’s
Feet of Judas, reminds, Christ washed Judas’ feet.
Some things you don’t know about your work:
Library of America, 2004, your work, 1000 pages,
Paper like silk, bound on boards, wrapped in cloth,
Richly maroon, and boxed, matching sewn ribbon
For marking pages. But beautiful. If I underline?
If I write in margins, I deface a treasure. You write
On page 615 when Jack Johnson defeats Jeffries.
*
NOT UNTIL I’M 75 YEARS OLD DO I READ
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF
AN EX-COLORED MAN
IN A SINGLE AFTERNOON, TELLING MY WIFE AT DINNER,
Karen, I’ve known about this book since high school,
But never read it. Listen. I take notes from first sentence,
...in writing the
following pages I am divulging
The great secret of my life. The second paragraph
Reveals the regret in the book’s last paragraph.
Of course I read it next. Beginning again, his mother’s
Arms hold him, he becomes a solitary. He turns in
The wrong notebook in school…a book that cleared
The whole mystery…and who is this father? She’ll…
Someday…—and while I’m reading,
My brother calls, He’s just seen
This movie, a message of hope,
David Byrnes’ American Utopia,
Every song better than the last,
If you need hope, especially
The last one, a protest,
Say her name
Say his name
Spike Lee directs
We’re burning down the house
Byrnes says and this
This is a connection
To the other side.
It’s a young singer,
Janelle Monáe
Hell you, Talmbaud,
Her chant, chanting
Names of Black Americans
Killed by police and vigilantes,
From 2015—anthemic—your tocaya
In our time—Wondaland arts, Afro
Futurist, asking listeners to record
Personal versions—Say her name—
Tagline on truth—voices cracking
The popping sounds
of technology and pistol
He added,
‘of course, you could go any place in the city,
they wouldn’t know you from white.’
Our author Learning language rolling cigars
Learning to speak by speaking.
Where vocabulary comes from.
One day his mother called him home.
This is your father. He promises a gift.
It’s a piano and you’ll never see him again.
But now you can talk to your mother,
And like Baldwin, you’ll get to Paris.
You’ll sit in a theatre watching Faust
Looking at a woman, imagining.
She’s young, beautiful, with her parents,
You’re there by accident looking
At her father, seeing, now, he’s yours’,
Too, this man you’ve seen once in your life.
Nothing is acknowledged.--
Another friend calls
Reading Yeats—
Turn to The Tower,
Last section, beginning,
Now I shall make my soul…
Yeats is an old man
My friend tightens down the poem
Like he did with Williams’
Red Wheelbarrow
Deleting ‘so much depends’
Now only this
Now I shall make my soul
However you make it
Repeating again, however
I would tell Karen
The story of the reading of this book
Reading it as James Weldon Johnson’s
Autobiography, misreading, because
I’d not known—published anonymously,
I’d not read enough—and I’d wake her
That night in bed, saying, I had it wrong,
The I in the story, it wasn’t Johnson,
It’s a book of fiction. Published that way.
And I got pulled in. Oh, man. This book.
Johnson knows the slave songs. It shows
In every piece of his work—James Weldon Johnson.
*
PLAY IT FORWARD, PLAY IT BACK,
FURTHERANCE—THIS LETTER,
DEAR MR. JAMES WELDON JOHNSON,
% OF WRITINGS, LIBRARY OF AMERICA
Your editorials from The New York Age:
Do You Read Negro Papers?
President Wilson’s “New Freedom” and the Negro,
Calibre Statesmen, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
And the Clansman, The Passing of Jack Johnson,
A Trap, “The Poor White Musician”,
Stranger Than Fiction, Saluting the Flag,
Responsibilities and Opportunities
Of the Colored Ministry, Under the Dome of the Capitol,
The Silent Parade, An Army with Banners,
Experienced Men Wanted, “Why Should a Negro Fight?”,
“Negro” With a Big “N”, Protesting Women and the War,
The Japanese Question in California,
The “Jim Crow” Car in Congress,
A Real Poet—Mr. Johnson, I’m stopping
Here—but beautiful--…there are, of course,…
Great poets that blaze out brightest…
These four great religious leaders…
All great ethical poets…Buddha,
Confucius, Christ and Mohammed…
Peaks of …genius of the races
That produced them…limited to
Oriental races. America
And the 2020 elections. I’m here,
Now. Me, thanking you for NAACP,
America has been saved by Black voters again.
A President whose name, We cannot say,
Has been ousted. Van Jones, Black voice,
It’s easier to be a parent this morning,
Kamala Harris, Howard University,
Dressed in a 2-piece pant suit,
Cream-colored blouse, our Vice-President—
Lift every voice and sing.
We’re singing, Mr. Johnson,
Just after Thanksgiving, we’re singing
In the midst of a new plague,
Singing through a poisonous time.
Walter Mosley, mystery writer, Black,
Receiving the national award for
We, the people, who are darker than blue,
I write you from Yakima, Washington,
Authenticated by Black writers, reading Cervantes,
almost done, this last redeeming note:
unnamed President protesting Detroit votes
that threw him out, files lawsuit.
NAACP Legal Defense Fund files
Federal lawsuit on behalf of Michigan
Voters, accusing him of violating
Voting Rights Act. Sherrilyn Ifill,
President and Director, Counsel of NAACP
Legal Defense Fund—cousin of Gwen Ifill,
(now with you), living on the page
And a new Commemorative Stamp,
The one on this letter, hand-cancelled,
Connects directly to you through one
Thurgood Marshall. I’m writing
From bed, after waking Karen,
My wife, to tell her about this lawsuit.
It’s Come Sunday here, Sunday Morning,
It’s dark, but the morning, and your words,
POST SCRIPT—BUT BEAUTIFUL
Access and other sources: Gilbert Chandler, Geoff Dyer,
READING AUDRE LORD AT THE HONDA DEALERSHIP
--I want to de-clutter the womb
Audre Lorde
My little Honda fit needs an oil change
and a tire rotation, while you’re coming at me
from all sides in good company—poets,
but old friends and a granddaughter! I’ve found
a corner cubicle with bottled water
away from breaking lug nuts free, back
from Frye Museum in Seattle where
Anastacia-Renee, built you a pulpit
surrounding her House of Lorde.
Red walls, red ceiling, red pulpit.
In addition, she boxed your books
in glass. Distance alters our perception,
radically, you tell the women in Berlin.
The sad privilege of travel. You’re talking about
timber in the voices of women who have
not been heard, asking to be dazzled
with color. Arriving like this,
the automatic door goes up
and I arrive at my appointment
with the nose of the car at 4 pm
as the clock turns to 4:01. Women
in South Africa. Let’s start there.
They lower their voices
wanting to talk about rent.
Nimble tongues one of your
take-aways. They’re asking you
to take their words to bed with you,
to write them a poem. You say,
I’m the President. You say,
Nobody can say a thing about
our being lesbian, because
I’m president now. Audre Lorde,
my friend writes. I’m still reading.
Some words are open, you write
in “Coal”, I am black because
I come from the earth’s inside.
It’s later now, and some parts
of your life have settled so words surface.
Absorption easier. We’re all shoreline
people it seems, mother’s milk
a survival weapon to cherish.
We’ve seen love vanish.
...and there are tapes to prove it.
I’m 75. A grandfather. Neither have I
been able to touch the destruction
within me. My granddaughter
searches for other images of beauty,
and we start with museums:
We are walking with God.
We insist God be with us at our side.
Ask about Inheritance, your question:
Who were you outside the 23d Psalm?
Jim Bodeen
27 April—3 May 2021
Jim Bodeen
29 November 2020
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