28 DAYS IN FEBRUARY

28 DAYS IN FEBRUARY

These three anthologies of African American poets have given me the best “then to now.” The one in the middle, edited by Arna Bontemps, came out in 1963, the year I graduated from high school. James Weldon Johnson, 1922, wrote “O Black and Unknown Bards,” and “The Creation (A Negro Sermon),” and Michael Harper and Anthony Walton, edited The Vintage Book of African American Poetry, published in 2000. Harper/Walton gives us voices—contemporary women and men, as well as the ancestors—but Johnson gave us the Negro National Anthem, and Barntemps gave us the poets James Baldwin learned from. These three together: roots, trunk, limbs, leaves, breathing for all, cleaning up the air.

DAY 1

NOTE TO MICHAEL HARPER

FROM LAST SUMMER

You’ve been there waiting

On the floor

both sides of my butterscotch chair

(En dos sentidos de esperanza--

Esperete—siempre esperete)

double-forked, double fucked hope

February breath

hesitation and reversal making do

Jim Bodeen

1 Feb 2021

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SECOND DAY IN FEBRUARY FOR MICHAEL S HARPER

...on good days one could build a synogogue in one’s own city,

call it city of testimony, conscious city of words.

Michael S. Harper, The Ghost of Soul-Making

Thing is, I didn’t know you were gone

so you weren’t. Notes at the back of MichaelTree

best notes ever written I kept saying

letters to friends, Best blue notebook

under lined notes to you what

shook me, shook me finding

I won’t say but you were

and you were there

with me on the tarmac with us we

few so many, trying to show

what you put on the page

a bridge over Johnson’s

book to Barntemps’, a quilt

to Elizabeth Alexander,

her genitalia/ will float inside a

pickling jar...a deportation plane

arrives in half an hour I gotta

be there, asylum seekers count

us too, I want you to know

Karen who quilts, and Rex,

the painter, a colorist we talked

Coltrane, we listened,

your poems psalm-sang

and walking the neighborhood

your words horns of supreme love

what John felt was coming

and Rex painted, he’s painting

again Rosalee Tompkins this time

Jesus and John transfigured, your children

heaven-dressed, a songline,

Michael Tree, these three books

bound by yours, outstanding inbreath

Jim Bodeen

2 February 2021