The Prince of Paradox
If I could just understand
what makes the one become again.
If I could just understand
the gall to demand; that that
flourishes even inside me.
I will wet the dust.
I will bring the rains.
I will mold this wet earth into a fist.
By the campfire, it bakes, I sit.
These passing moments,
I will hold on to them
to enamel a softer gaze.
The fist lies in wait.
Violence never seems to sate.
Latent in the glance of a neighbor.
Paranoia waits for divinity at the locked door.
I sit and arrange a mosaic of shining things.
A well of light with which to cleave
the concrete,
for now
for form is suffering
and I can feel the wind starting to take me.
Oh, to be dust again!
Please don’t shield your eyes from me this time.
Some poems by Henry Dumas
Knees of a Natural Man (for Jay Wright)
my ole man took me to the fulton fish market
we walk around in the guts and the scales
my ole man show me a dead fish, eyes like throat spit
he say “you hongry boy?” i say “naw, not yet”
my ole man show me how to pick the leavings
he say people throw away fish that not rotten
we scaling on our knees back uptown on lenox
sold five fish, keepin one for the pot
my ole man copped a bottle of wine
he say, “boy, build me a fire out in the lot”
backyard cat climbin up my leg for fish
i make a fire in the ash can
my ole man come when he smell fish
frank williams is with him, they got wine
my ole man say “the boy cotch the big one”
he tell big lie and slap me on the head
i give the guts to the cat and take me some wine
we walk around the sparks like we in hell
my ole man is laughin and coughin up wine
he say “you hongry boy” i say “naw, not yet”
next time i go to fulton fish market
first thing i do is take a long drink of wine
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America
If an eagle be imprisoned
On the back of a coin
And the coin is tossed into the sky,
That coin will spin,
That coin will flutter,
But the eagle will never fly.
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Thought
Love came to me and said:
What do you want of me?
Save me I said, Save me.
Love knelt down beside me
and love said:
If you knew the price
of coming to you,
you would ask nothing
but would give.
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Love Song
Beloved,
I have to adore the earth:
The wind must have heard
your voice once.
It echoes and sings like you.
The soil must have tasted
you once.
It is laden with your scent.
The trees honor you
in gold
and blush when you pass.
I know why the north country
is frozen.
It has been trying to preserve
your memory.
I know why the desert
burns with fever.
It has wept too long without you.
On hands and knees,
the ocean begs up the beach,
and falls at your feet.
I have to adore
the mirror of the earth.
You have taught her well
how to be beautiful.
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Play Ebony Play Ivory
play ebony play ivory
play chords that
speak primeval
play ebony play ivory
play notes that
speak my people…
play ebony play ivory
play til air explodes
play til it subsides
play ebony play ivory.
for the songless, the dead
who rot the earth
all these dead,
whose muted sour tongues
speak broken chords,
all these aging people
poison the heart of earth.
they cannot sing
they cannot play
they cannot breathe the early rhythm
they never heard the pulse of womb
so up! you bursting lungs
you spirits of morning breath
up! and make fingers
and play long and play soft
play ebony play ivory.
play my people
all my people who breathe
the breath of earth
all my people who are keys and chords…
now touch
and hear and see
let your lungs scream
til they explode
til blood subsides
and flesh vibrates…
make chords that speak
play long play soft
play ebony play ivory
play ebony
play ivory
I’m in the Chemical Valley (the Number of Eyes Vary)
I look out and canyons of calamity
stretch up towards me,
because I am here for but a blink in the grand scheme,
but my waste products will witness the dance of the stones
and the changing ground that
will eventually no longer bear our feet.
The packaging of my life
may get a glimpse of eternity.
An outline of this body
and all the souls consumed by me, me, me.
Even still,
it’s always my present predicament.
I’m over being strung out on sentiment.
What of the way the river dances?
I celebrate every hour of this day
like each chime of the clock
is my own personal Christmas.
“Perhaps he has heard a warning of someone’s death,
a strange noise, a shriek on the roof.
Perhaps a man has passed him in the open road
and disappeared suddenly, leaving no tracks…
Always there is some souvenir of the spirit-world
Bite the head off the first butterfly you see,
and you will get a new dress.
Take seven hairs from a blood snake,
seven scales from a rattlesnake,
seven bits of feathers from an owl –
boil for seven minutes over a hot fire
in the first rainwater caught in April.
Still,
there it is.”
“The Enforcement of Mosaic Law
To Be Square with the Sun at Noon, STAND STILL and Consider the Wonderous Work of God
The center of attention in a Calvinist meetinghouse was the pulpit from which the minister preached. New England historian Alice Morse Earle remembered that “the pulpit of one old unpainted church retained until the middle of this [nineteenth] century, as its sole decoration, an enormous, carefully painted, staring eye, a terrible and suggestive illustration to youthful wrong-doers of the great all-seeing eye of God.”
Outside, the walls were rough unpainted clapboards. On them were nailed the bounty-heads of wolves with dark crimson bloodstains below. The doors were covered with tattered scraps of faded paper which told of intended marriages, provincial proclamations, sales of property, and sometimes rude insults in which one disgruntled townsman denounced another.
Inside, most meetinghouses had no ornaments except that terrible staring eye—no paint, no curtains, no plaster, no pictures, no lights—nothing to distract the congregation from the spoken word.
Frozen communion bread, frostbitten fingers, baptisms performed with chunks of ice and entire congregations with chattering teeth that sounded like a field of crickets.
Sometimes they dressed in rags and smeared streaks of dirt upon their faces to deepen their humiliation. Occasionally, they were compelled literally to crawl before the congregation.
The meetinghouses of New England were often set high on a commanding hilltop. Roxbury’s aged minister John Eliot was heard to say as he climbed meetinghouse hill on the arm of a townsman, “This is very like the way to heaven; ‘tis uphill.
This Ritual of Worship Became a Powerful Instrument
At the end of a New England service a psalm was sung, if singing is the word to describe the strange cacophony that rose from a Puritan congregation. Here again, the emphasis was on words rather than music. The psalm would be begun with a line by a member of the congregation. Then each individual “took the run of the tune” without common tempo, pitch or scale. One observer wrote in 1720, “ … everyone sang as best pleased himself.” Another described the effect as a “horrid medley of confused and disorderly noises.” Strangers were astounded by the noise, which carried miles across the quiet countryside. But New Englanders were deeply moved by this “rote singing” as it was called, and strenuously resisted efforts to improve it. The result was a major controversy in the eighteenth century between what was called “rote singing” and “note singing.”
Much later, Harriet Beecher Stowe remembered that “the rude and primitive singing in our old meeting house always excited me powerfully. It brought over me, like a presence, the sense of the infinite and the eternal, the yearning and the fear and the desire of the poor finite being, as if walking on air, with the final words of the psalm floating like an illuminated cloud around me.
Afterwards, how ghostly and supernatural the stillness of the whole house and village outside the meeting-house used to appear to me, how loudly the clock ticked and the flies buzzed down the window-pane, and how I listened in the breathless stillness to the distant wind, the solemn tones of the cattle in the field, and then to the monotone of the lamp burning, and then again to the closing echoes of that cold, distant wind.””
Goals:
“Her efforts ensured that, when she passed away in November, nearly half of the attendees to her memorial pedaled to the service.”