Voices from the fringes: Crust and sugar over

We started out National Poetry Month with one of the major figures in the Harlem Renaissance, Audre Lorde. Let’s round up with another. Because I just don’t think you can have too much Langston Hughes.

“Harlem” was published in 1951, but it could describe the African American experience today, or 100 or 200 or 300 years before. Eleven lines that pretty much encompass the history of the United States, from 1619 to 2021.

“Harlem”

What happens to a dream deferred?

      Does it dry up
      like a raisin in the sun?
      Or fester like a sore—
      And then run?
      Does it stink like rotten meat?
      Or crust and sugar over—
      like a syrupy sweet?

      Maybe it just sags
      like a heavy load.

      Or does it explode?

A dream deferred for 400 years is pretty much a dream denied. We need to get past this.

 

 

Voices from the fringes: the witch-grey hair of a ghost

Garrett Hongo was born in Volcano, Hawaii, six years after the end of World War II. He is of Japanese descent, and many of his poems deal with the wholesale forced relocation of tens of thousands of Japanese American citizens to concentration camps inland from the West Coast. Today’s entry for National Poetry Month was published in 1982.

The shakuhachi is an end-blown flute made from bamboo; you might hear it as background music at a spa. (Fun fact, I once attended a shakuhachi concert in Little Tokyo. It was rather a stretch to my Western music ears. But it may have made more sense than Mahler’s Nineth Symphony.)

“Something Whispered in the Shakuhachi”

No one knew the secret of my flutes,
and I laugh now
because some said I was enlightened.
But the truth is
I’m only a gardener
who before the War
was a dirt farmer and learned
how to grow the bamboo
in ditches next to the fields,
how to leave things alone
and let the silt build up
until it was deep enough to stink
bad as night soil, bad
as the long, witch-grey
hair of a ghost.

No secret in that.

My land was no good, rocky,
and so dry I had to sneak
water from the whites,
hacksaw the locks off the chutes at night,
and blame Mexicans, Filipinos,
or else some wicked spirit
of a migrant, murdered in his sleep
by sheriffs and wanting revenge.
Even though they never believed me,
it didn’t matter—no witnesses,
and my land was never thick with rice,
only the bamboo
growing lush as old melodies
and whispering like brush strokes
against the fine scroll of wind.

I found some string in the shed
or else took a few stalks
and stripped off their skins,
wove the fibers, the floss,
into cords I could bind
around the feet, ankles, and throats
of only the best bamboos.
I used an ice pick for an awl,
a fish knife to carve finger holes,
and a scythe to shape the mouthpiece.

I had my flutes.

                           *

When the War came,
I told myself I lost nothing.

My land, which was barren,
was not actually mine but leased
(we could not own property)
and the shacks didn’t matter.

What did were the power lines nearby
and that sabotage was suspected.

What mattered to me
were the flutes I burned
in a small fire
by the bath house.

                           *

All through Relocation,
in the desert where they put us,
at night when the stars talked
and the sky came down
and drummed against the mesas,
I could hear my flutes
wail like fists of wind
whistling through the barracks.
I came out of Camp,
a blanket slung over my shoulder,
found land next to this swamp,
planted strawberries and beanplants,
planted the dwarf pines and tended them,
got rich enough to quit
and leave things alone,
let the ditches clog with silt again
and the bamboo grow thick as history.

                           *

So, when it’s bad now,
when I can’t remember what’s lost
and all I have for the world to take
means nothing,
I go out back of the greenhouse
at the far end of my land
where the grasses go wild
and the arroyos come up
with cat’s-claw and giant dahlias,
where the children of my neighbors
consult with the wise heads
of sunflowers, huge against the sky,
where the rivers of weather
and the charred ghosts of old melodies
converge to flood my land
and sustain the one thicket
of memory that calls for me
to come and sit
among the tall canes
and shape full-throated songs
out of wind, out of bamboo,
out of a voice
that only whispers.

 

 

 

Voices from the fringes: Search for home

The poet for today’s National Poetry Month post is George Abraham, a Palestinian American born in Jacksonville, Fla. I have to say that I don’t find many of Abraham’s poems immediately accessible; I have to work to grasp what they’re saying. “in which you are the emptiness they made of your palestinian/queerness” is one of the more self-evident examples.

Abraham incorporates words not expressed into his poem, leaving the reader to literally fill in the blanks. It’s a little like cloud pruning—wherein the spaces between are the connective tissue for the parts that are filled. I dunno—whaddaya think?

“in which you are the emptiness they made of your palestinian/queerness” 

 

Voices from the fringe: We mourn and we bend

The event that jump-started my theme for this year’s National Poetry Month postings was watching the amazing and thrilling performance by Amanda Gorman at the inauguration of President Joe Biden. The 22-year-old in brilliant colors reciting “The Hill We Climb” completely stole the event.

Considering that Lady Gaga and J-Lo were also on the program, I gotta say that poets totally rule.

As with yesterday’s poet, I feel that Gorman’s work is more powerful when she speaks it, when she adds her literal voice to her poetic voice. She has a hip-hop vibe that benefits from the audience hearing and watching her—her hands, her face, her body all support the message. Poets like Gorman and Giles are more than writers, they’re performance artists.

See if you don’t agree with me as she recites “The Miracle of Morning”, as she tackles Life after COVID. This is the poem I need after a year of pandemic and four years of chaotic authoritarianism. It stuns me that such a young woman has such wisdom and such clarity of communication. But, man, she gives me hope. 

 

Gratitude Monday: Recognition of genocide

Six years ago, on the centenary of the beginning of the Turkish campaign to eradicate the Armenian people, I wrote about it. April, 1915, was a momentous month for inhumanity: the opening of unrestricted submarine warfare by the Germans, inauguration of using chemical weapons (by the Germans, although the Brits already had a stockpile of gas, so they weren’t far behind) and the first genocide-as-policy in the Twentieth Century.

Welcome to civilization, eh?

For a century, Armenians have pushed for Turkey to just recognize that they did what they did. But they’ve refused.

“Oh, yeah, some Armenians, uh, had these pre-existing conditions, so they died during the relocation-that-totally-was-not-a-death-march.”

“Also, look, some of them might have stepped in front of our soldiers while they were firing their weapons. Stuff happens.”

“Atatürk was the greatest leader of the Twentieth Century. Until Erdogan.”

“We did nothing wrong.”

Yeah—observers from their own allies (Austrians and Germans) were appalled at the scale of death, and reports flew out to the other side, too. But, you know, stuff happens, and Armenians didn’t have much of interest to big powers, so it was largely buried. Alongside 1.5 million bodies.

Ronald Reagan included the Armenian destruction in the term “genocide” when he spoke at the dedication of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. But no president since then has dared mention the event because Turkey is strategically located geopolitically. (In Turkey, you can’t utter “Armenians” and “genocide” together without risking prison. That’s how terrified they are of the truth.)

Well, on Saturday, President Biden spoke out against both the crime and the authoritarianism that’s been covering it up for a century—and was loud and clear. (Yeah, this is in part because we’re not as in love with Turkey as we used to be, and because Erdogan has just been taking the piss for the last four years.) I am so grateful for this sea change; just acknowledging publicly that events that happened, happened. I’m grateful for the Armenians, and for the United States, because it signals that we at least know where the moral high ground is.

I am hopeful.

 

 

Voices from the fringes: Not in Africa, not in Fiji

You have to work to find one of the poems of Will Nu’utupu Giles in print. The Samoan American from Honolulu’s poetry is—rather like Gertrude Stein’s—made to be shared via the human voice. It’s part of their Pacific Islander oral tradition, and they make the most of it. I started watching their videos, and I couldn’t choose only one for today’s National Poetry Month post.

Giles seeks out political undercurrents in the quotidian. As in “Deodorant”, where they walk into the personal hygiene aisle and emerge in the Middle Passage, genocide and colonialism:

But he also soars, as when he compares their family history to redwoods, in terms of strength and resiliency, here in “Prescribed Fire”.

 

 

Voices from the fringes: Wild abrazos of climbing roses

Born in San Francisco, Lorna Dee Cervantes was raised in San José, California, a 40-minute ride down the valley on what’s now I-280. Her childhood was difficult—family split up, alcoholic mother, inhospitable environment both landscape and human. Her grandmother, of Chumash descent, was where she turned for love and support. Cervantes got a degree from San José State, then went on to study at UC Santa Cruz. She’s considered a major figure in Chicanx literature; she often expresses the confusion of living between two cultures by flowing between Spanish and English in her poems, as evidenced by today’s entry for National Poetry Month.

The San José neighborhood in which Cervantes grew up was razed to build I-280, a freeway that twice a weekday doubles as a parking lot between the South Bay and San Francisco. Here she revisits the area and reflects on survival and flourishing in the face of a dominant culture with bulldozers and concrete.

“Freeway 280”

Las casitas near the gray cannery,
nestled amid wild abrazos of climbing roses
and man-high red geraniums
are gone now.  The freeway conceals it
all beneath a raised scar.

But under the fake windsounds of the open lanes,
in the abandoned lots below, new grasses sprout,
wild mustard remembers, old gardens
come back stronger than they were,
trees have been left standing in their yards.
Albaricoqueros, cerezos, nogales . . .
Viejitas come here with paper bags to gather greens.
Espinaca, verdolagas, yerbabuena . . .

I scramble over the wire fence
that would have kept me out.
Once, I wanted out, wanted the rigid lanes
to take me to a place without sun,
without the smell of tomatoes burning
on swing shift in the greasy summer air.

Maybe it's here
en los campos extraños de esta ciudad
where I'll find it, that part of me
mown under
like a corpse
or a loose seed.

 

 

 

 

Voices from the fringes: The fraud of men

Well, hey, nonny—it’s Will Shakespeare’s birthday. His 457^th, to be more precise. At least, we think so. (He was baptized on 26 April, 1564, so the presumption is that he was born on the 23^rd.) At any rate, he died on 23 April, 1616, so it’s a Thing.

In all the years I’ve posted for National Poetry Month, I’ve never given you a song from one of his plays, so let’s rectify that today. “Sigh No More, Ladies” is from Much Ado About Nothing”, one of the comedies that deals with mistaken identity, trickery, sibling rivalry and really gullible men.

In keeping with this year’s NPM theme, I’m giving you a version performed by Cleo Laine, an English jazz singer. See what you think.

 

 

 

 

Voices from the fringes: We want to be fish now

I think I first heard about the writer and poet Saeed Jones when I literally heard him being interviewed on NPR. Growing up Black and gay in suburban Texas has clearly given him things to write about, and he’s a powerful and articulate writer. His 2019 memoir is titled How We Fight for our Lives; his debut poetry collection is titled Prelude to Bruise. Those two facts kind of give you an idea.

The poem I’ve selected for today’s National Poetry Month post is from that collection. It’s one of Jones’s more straightforward pieces, if perhaps wistfully fanciful. But it also makes me consider what the brilliant Daedalus' life might have been like after his son's death. Did he wander around beaches muttering to himself and wishing for Icarus to return?

“Daedalus, After Icarus”

Boys begin to gather around the man like seagulls.
He ignores them entirely, but they follow him
from one end of the beach to the other.
Their footprints burn holes in the sand.
It’s quite a sight, a strange parade:
a man with a pair of wings strapped to his arms
followed by a flock of rowdy boys.
Some squawk and flap their bony limbs.
Others try to leap now and then, stumbling
as the sand tugs at their feet. One boy pretends to fly
in a circle around the man, cawing in his face.

We don’t know his name or why he walks
along our beach, talking to the wind.
To say nothing of those wings. A woman yells
to her son, Ask him if he’ll make me a pair.
Maybe I’ll finally leave your father.
He answers our cackles with a sudden stop,
turns, and runs toward the water.
The children jump into the waves after him.
Over the sound of their thrashes and giggles,
we hear a boy say, We don’t want wings.
We want to be fish now.

 

 

Voices from the fringes: Witness my open palm

Tarfia Faizullah was born in Brooklyn in 1980, daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants who moved to Midland, Tex., while she was a child. In 2010, she traveled to her parents’ homeland to interview survivors of systematic rape by Pakistani soldiers in the 1971 war for Bangladesh’s independence. The stories she collected from the birangona became the subject matter for her 2014 collection of poetry, Seam.

Today’s entry for National Poetry Month comes from that book. An aubade is a song or poem about lovers parting at daybreak. Looking at how Faizullah constructs it, I see at least three possible lines of narrative, and I find it compelling from the title to the last line.

“Aubade Ending in the Death of a Mosquito”

          —at Apollo Hospital, Dhaka

Let me break
                            free of these lace-frail
                            lilac fingers disrobing
the black sky
                            from the windows of this
                            room, I sit helpless, waiting,
silent—sister,
                            because you drew from me
                            the coil of red twine: loneliness—
spooled inside—
                            once, I wanted to say one
                            true thing, as in, I want more
in this life,
                            or, the sky is hurt, a blue vessel—
                            we pass through each other,
like weary
                            sweepers haunting through glass
                            doors, arcing across gray floors
faint trails
                            of dust we leave behind—he
                            touches my hand, waits for me
to clutch back
                            while mosquitoes rise like smoke
                            from this cold marble floor,
from altars,
                            seeking the blood still humming
                            in our unsaved bodies—he sighs,
I make a fist,
                            I kill this one leaving raw
                            kisses raised on our bare necks—
because I woke
                            alone in the myth of one life, I will
                            myself into another—how strange,
to witness
                            nameless, the tangled shape
                            our blood makes across us,
my open palm.