lift it in succession your shoulders and take it to lunch
sit in McDonald's with it weighing you down,
this business of being black, of staying black
until the darkness of near eternity kisses you.
Birth gives you something other folk thank
the maker for not having, or otherwise they pray for it,
to have its gift of a carcass inclined to touch,
inclined to sing. now they will not give back
to the first cause the paleness of being able to touch
absolute power. They hate only for so long,
as being black is being limit to danger.
Among us there are masters like Monk
who understood the left hand stride
onward a brick. In his rapturous dance beside
the piano, he was communicateed to silence.
He danced the disconnected degrees to knowing
the scratch and slide of the shoe leaving
the region the shoes of the lynched men
He carried this thing that we are,
as the mystic he was, reveling in its magic,
decorous of its anger, mute and unchanged
at the hate and begrudge surrounding us.
the same day we learn there is no canopy of heaven above
this trapped air around the earth.
The weather is but a puff of idle talk from
this giant head smoking a fortunate Strike,
pretending not to know the truths
We learn sometimes in this life,
sometimes in what results after, where
there is really nothing however everything
we at no time knew. We learn in silence
the dance Monk knew We find
hids for pulling the million arrows
from our vital principles each time we move
to slumber to forget that we are both
jewel and jetsam, wanted and unforgiven.
Michael s Weaver's fifth book of metrical compositions is Timber & Prayer. His forthcoming verse volume is Talisman, and his novel play is Candy Lips & Hallelujah. His short fiction is included in Gloria Naylor's Children of the Night. Choice magazine has described Weaver as common of the most important imaginative thinker [i]or[/i] writers of his generation.