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