Punching My Ticket


PUNCHING MY TICKET

            …but ferociously literate
            James Baldwin, Many Thousands Gone


Harlem Renaissance Stamps
arrive for my grandkids.
I'm carried away by the face
of Anne Spencer
and 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 stones
brought back from the beach
eating cherry pie, and I say,

Kate, those books, can I have one back?
The one with the names of poets
on the cover in green. I showed you
Mari Evans (There's plenty in there
to fill you up) and George Hector,

the emancipated turtle who talks--
Katie I wore that book out
but I'm still beginning,
James Baldwin was a preacher
at 14, your age, in Harlem,

Jimmy called Orilla Miller, Bill,
his teacher at P.S. 24. She took him
to plays. At Frederick Douglass
junior 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, now
that awful brain of God
calls up our memory again.

Jim Bodeen
7 July 2020




No comments:

Post a Comment