Old Gwendolyn,
with your warm song
numbering each wrong

giving each hurt

a time,
a place,
a child's ghetto face

Old Gwendolyn
leaning to your left
laboring slowly

asking us to love

that little ugly
ugly little
black boy

We are the audience

to whom you sing

With our capped teeth

And our diamond rings

The glittering sweet smell

of suburban innocence

Tonight, our race

is the burden of your verse

You might have been an ornate gate
joining a bridge to a castle

But you chose instead
to be a tunnel,

to funnel
too many years
of
close
attention

to distill
and crystallize

a defining rod
to focus us
within
where
indifference
erodes innocence

You bend once again
to send your
word

weaving

breath -

where the flesh burns
you build a bandage
of language

Yes, poetry is the bloom
in the Queen's garden
Yes, poetry is the twisting branch
on the tree of knowledge

Yet,
in these raunchy
dope dealing
times
when tits drip
cocaine
into a baby's brain
and a bag lady
lies down
below the headlines
beneath the bleeding
beneath the needing

 

beneath the lies

then poetry is not bloom,
not branch,
not spring or autumn leaf
but the last black diamond

laboring

in the dark earth

Tonight
the glittering audience is all white
and so very polite

And you,
the so black old face
staring from the elevated table
across the shiny white table cloth
across the shiny white plate
with the dribble of dark gravy

You,
the proud,
pained old oak face
are called upon
to witness your race

in times too cruel
for fancy Easter bonnets
or tuneful sonnets
you have learned the art
of the eloquent curse
cunningly you set
your snares
in verse

Like the hunchback
you are hobbled,
twisted by what you have seen
by what you know
by what you know
tomorrow brings

And so you sing
to allow souls to see:
Soweto township is here

"Please bleed with me!
Please listen in our common heart
Please meet me in this cruel jewel sea

And by our gift of poetry
Be joined in our humanity"

(reprinted by permission of jon madian)