You said, “Now take your shoes off,” while what played
Was not the back-town boogie but a green
Wet music stuff, above the wide and clean
Sand, and my hand laughed.
Toes urged the slab to amber foam.
And I was hurt by cider in the air.
And what the lake-wash did was dizzying.
I thought of England, as I watched you bring
The speckled pebbles,
The smooth quartz; I thought of Italy.
Italy and England come.
A sea sits up and starts to sing to me.
The Ballad of Rudolph Reed
Rudolph Reed was oaken.
His wife was oaken too.
And his two good girls and his good little man
Oakened as they grew.
“I am not hungry for berries.
I am not hungry for bread.
But hungry hungry for a house
Where at night a man in bed
“May never hear the plaster
Stir as if in pain.
May never hear the roaches
Falling like fat rain.
“Where never wife and children need
Go blinking through the gloom.
Where every room of many rooms
Will be full of room.
“Oh my home may have its east or west
Or north or south behind it.
All I know is I shall know it,
And fight for it when I find it.”
It was in a street of bitter white
That he made his application.
For Rudolph Reed was oakener
Than others in the nation.
The agent’s steep and steady stare
Corroded to a grin.
Why, you black old, tough old hell of a man,
Move your family in!
Nary a grin grinned Rudolph Reed,
Nary a curse cursed he,
But moved in his House. With his dark little wife,
And his dark little children three.
A neighbor would look, with a yawning eye
That squeezed into a slit.
But the Rudolph Reeds and the children three
Were too joyous to notice it.
For were they not firm in a home of their own
With windows everywhere
And a beautiful banistered stair
And a front yard for flowers and a back yard for grass?
The first night, a rock, big as two fists.
The second, a rock big as three.
But nary a curse cursed Rudolph Reed.
(Though oaken as man could be.)
The third night, a silvery ring of glass.
Patience ached to endure.
But he looked, and lo! small Mabel’s blood
Was staining her gaze so pure.
Then up did rise our Rudolph Reed
And pressed the hand of his wife,
And went to the door with a thirty-four
And a beastly butcher knife.
He ran like a mad thing into the night.
And the words in his mouth were stinking.
By the time he had hurt his first white man
He was no longer thinking.
By the time he had hurt his fourth white man
Rudolph Reed was dead.
His neighbors gathered and kicked his corpse.
“Nigger—” his neighbors said.
Small Mabel whimpered all night long,
For calling herself the cause.
Her oak-eyed mother did no thing
But change the bloody gauze.
The Egg Boiler
Being you, you cut your poetry from wood.
The boiling of an egg is heavy art.
You come upon it as an artist should,
With rich-eyed passion, and with straining heart.
We fools, we cut our poems out of air,
Night color, wind soprano, and such stuff.
And sometimes weightlessness is much to bear.
You mock it, though, you name it Not Enough.
The egg, spooned gently to the avid pan,
And left the strict three minutes, or the four,
Is your Enough and art for any man.
We fools give courteous ear—then cut some more,
Shaping a gorgeous Nothingness from cloud.
You watch us, eat your egg, and laugh aloud.
FROM
SELECTED POEMS | 1963
A Catch of Shy Fish
garbageman: the man with the orderly mind
What do you think of us in fuzzy endeavor, you whose directions are sterling, whose lunge is straight?
Can you make a reason, how can you pardon us who memorize the rules and never score?
Who memorize the rules from your own text but never quite transfer them to the game,
Who never quite receive the whistling ball, who gawk, begin to absorb the crowd’s own roar.
Is earnestness enough, may earnestness attract or lead to light;
Is light enough, if hands in clumsy frenzy, flimsy whimsicality, enlist;
Is light enough when this bewilderment crying against the dark shuts down the shades?
Dilute confusion. Find and explode our mist.
sick man looks at flowers
You are sick and old, and there is a closing in—
The eyes gone dead to all that would beguile.
Echoes are dull and the body accepts no touch
Except its pain. Mind is a little isle.
But now invades this impudence of red!
This ripe rebuke, this burgeoning affluence
Mocks me and mocks the desert of my bed.
old people working (garden, car)
Old people working. Making a gift of garden.
Or washing a car, so some one else may ride.
A note of alliance, an eloquence of pride.
A way of greeting or sally to the world.
weaponed woman
Well, life has been a baffled vehicle
And baffling. But she fights, and
Has fought, according to her lights and
The lenience of her whirling-place.
She fights with semi-folded arms,
Her strong bag, and the stiff
Frost of her face (that challenges “When” and “If.”)
And altogether she does Rather Well.
old tennis player
Refuses
To refuse the racket, to mutter No to the net.
He leans to life, conspires to give and get
Other serving yet.
a surrealist and Omega
Omega ran to witness him; beseeched;
Brought caution and carnality and cash.
She sauced him brownly, eating him
Under her fancy’s finest Worcestershire.
He zigzagged.
He was a knotted hiss.
He was an insane hash
Of rebellious small strengths
And soft-mouthed mumbling weakness.
The art
Would not come right. That smear,
That yellow in the gray corner—
That was not right, he had not reached
The right, the careless flailed-out bleakness.
A god, a child.
He said he was most seriously amiss.
She had no purple or pearl to hang
About the neck of one a-wild.
A bantam beauty
Loving his ownhood for all it was worth.
Spaulding and François
There are cloudlets and things of cool silver in our dream, there are all of the Things Ethereal.
There is a
Scent of wind cut with pine, a noise of
Wind tangled among bells. There is spiritual laughter
Too hushed to be gay, too high: the happiness
Of angels. And there are angels’ eyes, soft,
Heavy with precious compulsion.
But the People
Will not let us alone; will not credit, condone
Art-loves that shun
Them (moderate Christians rotting in the sun.)
Big Bessie throws her son into the street
A day of sunny face and temper.
The winter trees
Are musical.
Bright lameness from my beautiful disease,
You have your destiny to chip and eat.
Be precise.
With something better than candles in the eyes.
(Candles are not enough.)
At the root of the will, a wild inflammable stuff.
New pioneer of days and ways, be gone.
Hunt out your own or make your own alone.
Go down the street.
FROM
IN THE MECCA | 1968
FROM AFTER MECCA
Boy Breaking Glass
To Marc Crawford
from whom the commission
Whose broken window is a cry of art
(success, that winks aware
as elegance, as a treasonable faith)
is raw: is sonic: is old-eyed première.
Our beautiful flaw and terrible ornament.
Our barbarous and metal little man.
“I shall create! If not a note, a hole.
If not an overture, a desecration.”
Full of pepper and light
and Salt and night and cargoes.
“Don’t go down the plank
if you see there’s no extension.
Each to his grief, each to
his loneliness and fidgety revenge.
Nobody knew where I was and now I am no longer there.”
The only sanity is a cup of tea.
The music is in minors.
Each one other
is having different weather.
“It was you, it was you who threw away my name!
And this is everything I have for me.”
Who has not Congress, lobster, love, luau,
the Regency Room, the Statue of Liberty,
runs. A sloppy amalgamation.
A mistake.
A cliff.
A hymn, a snare, and an exceeding sun.
Medgar Evers
For Charles Evers
The man whose height his fear improved he
arranged to fear no further. The raw
intoxicated time was time for better birth or
a final death.
Old styles, old tempos, all the engagement of
the day—the sedate, the regulated fray—
the antique light, the Moral rose, old gusts,
tight whistlings from the past, the mothballs
in the Love at last our man forswore.
Medgar Evers annoyed confetti and assorted
brands of businessmen’s eyes.
The shows came down: to maxims and surprise.
And palsy.
Roaring no rapt arise-ye to the dead, he
leaned across tomorrow. People said that
he was holding clean globes in his hands.
Malcolm X
For Dudley Randall
Original.
Ragged-round.
Rich-robust.
He had the hawk-man’s eyes.
We gasped. We saw the maleness.
The maleness raking out and making guttural the air
and pushing us to walls.
And in a soft and fundamental hour
a sorcery devout and vertical
beguiled the world.
He opened us—
who was a key,
who was a man.
Two Dedications
I The Chicago Picasso
August 15, 1967
“Mayor Daley tugged a white ribbon, loosing the blue percale wrap. A hearty cheer went up as the covering slipped off the big steel sculpture that looks at once like a bird and a woman.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
(Seiji Ozawa leads the Symphony.
The Mayor smiles.
And 50,000 See.)
Does man love Art? Man visits Art, but squirms.
Art hurts. Art urges voyages—
and it is easier to stay at home,
the nice beer ready.
In commonrooms
we belch, or sniff, or scratch.
Are raw.
But we must cook ourselves and style ourselves for Art, who
is a requiring courtesan.
We squirm.
We do not hug the Mona Lisa.
We
may touch or tolerate
an astounding fountain, or a horse-and-rider.
At most, another Lion.
Observe the tall cold of a Flower
which is as innocent and as guilty,
as meaningful and as meaningless as any
other flower in the western field.
II The Wall
August 27, 1967
For Edward Christmas
“The side wall of a typical slum building on the corner of 43rd and Langley became a mural communicating black dignity. . . .”
—Ebony
A drumdrumdrum.
Humbly we come.
South of success and east of gloss and glass are
sandals;
flowercloth;
grave hoops of wood or gold, pendant
from black ears, brown ears, reddish-brown
and ivory ears;
black boy-men.
Black
boy-men on roofs fist out “Black Power!” Val,
a little black stampede
in African
images of brass and flowerswirl,
fists out “Black Power!”—tightens pretty eyes,
leans back on mothercountry and is tract,
is treatise through her perfect and tight teeth.
Women in wool hair chant their poetry.
Phil Cohran gives us messages and music
made of developed bone and polished and honed cult.
It is the Hour of tribe and of vibration,
the day-long Hour. It is the Hour
of ringing, rouse, of ferment-festival.
On Forty-third and Langley
black furnaces resent ancient
legislatures
of ploy and scruple and practical gelatin.
They keep the fever in,
fondle the fever.
All
worship the Wall.
I mount the rattling wood. Walter
says, “She is good.” Says, “She
our Sister is.” In front of me
hundreds of faces, red-brown, brown, black, ivory,
yield me hot trust, their yea and their Announcement
that they are ready to rile the high-flung ground.
Behind me, Paint.
Heroes.
No child has defiled
the Heroes of this Wall this serious Appointment
this still Wing
this Scald this Flute this heavy Light this Hinge.
An emphasis is paroled.
The old decapitations are revised,
the dispossessions beakless.
And we sing.
The Blackstone Rangers
I As Seen by Disciplines
There they are.
Thirty at the corner.
Black, raw, ready.
Sores in the city
that do not want to heal.
II The Leaders
Jeff. Gene. Geronimo. And Bop.
They cancel, cure and curry.
Hardly the dupes of the downtown thing
the cold bonbon,
the rhinestone thing. And hardly
in a hurry.
Hardly Belafonte, King,
Black Jesus, Stokely, Malcolm X or Rap.
Bungled trophies.
Their country is a Nation on no map.
Jeff, Gene, Geronimo and Bop
in the passion
ate noon,
in bewitching night
are the detailed men, the copious men.
They curry, cure,
they cancel, cancelled images whose Concerts
are not divine, vivacious; the different tins
are intense last entries; pagan argument;
translations of the night.
The Blackstone bitter bureaus
(bureaucracy is footloose) edit, fuse
unfashionable damnations and descent;
and exulting, monstrous hand on monstrous hand,
construct, strangely, a monstrous pearl or grace.
III Gang Girls
A Rangerette
Gang Girls are sweet exotics.
Mary Ann
uses the nutrients of her orient,
but sometimes sighs for Cities of blue and jewel
beyond her Ranger rim of Cottage Grove.
(Bowery Boys, Disciples, Whip-Birds will
dissolve no margins, stop no savory sanctities.)
Mary is
a rose in a whiskey glass.
Mary’s
Februaries shudder and are gone. Aprils
fret frankly, lilac hurries on.
Summer is a hard irregular ridge.
October looks away.
And that’s the Year!
Save for her bugle-love.
Save for the bleat of not-obese devotion.
Save for Somebody Terribly Dying, under
The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks Page 8