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
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