Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth

by Yusef Komunyakaa

  when strings are struck,

  reaching down through muscle memory

  to a shelter of mud bricks baked under

  three thousand years of sunlight,

  from the goatherd to the King

  of Kings, to Bob Marley. If Ethiopia

  opens in the long Egyptian trumpets

  or natural blues of the saxophone,

  there’s little pomp & circumstance

  in this earthy instrument

  raised between violin & crossbow,

  to dance with, or embrace.

  When it speaks, especially

  to the drum, this sounding-loom

  is the voice of a nation

  bargaining with the gods.

  DEAD RECKONING II

  In a half-broken room of the hospice

  the bent figure on a bed is far from Osibisa

  or his twenty-four-hour rock ’n’ roll gig

  in England. Now, fame is a tale mermaids

  tell fishermen, but all I want to know is

  where are Kiki Djan’s friends & lovers,

  his millions? His eyes stop us at the foot

  of the bed. Outside, migratory birds

  fly in the shape of a falling garment.

  He hugs a tape recorder, head swaying

  to an unreleased recording cut overseas.

  The hum of an insect can hold his gaze

  for hours, the ancestors at a side door.

  The song is his only possession, fingers

  on the keyboard only a little howl lost

  in a trade wind nudging a pirate ship.

  His eyes tell us all the tangled paths

  taken, & now he must be a Lindbergh

  who crossed the sleepless Atlantic.

  To fully master out-of-body travel

  by dead reckoning, one has to know

  all the overtime shadows of obeah

  working around the clock in Accra.

  He stares at the buzz of a bluebottle

  throbbing against the windowpane.

  A NIGHT IN TUNISIA

  How long have I listened

  to this blues & how long

  has Dizzy Gillespie been dead?

  I remember an old longing,

  a young man reaching

  for luck, a finger poised

  between pages of Baldwin’s

  Notes of a Native Son, a clock

  stopped for a hard, crystal-

  clear moment. This was

  a lifetime before the night

  streets of Tunisia burned

  on cell phones in the clouds,

  tear gas & machine-gun fire

  & my head in my hands

  an hour. I traveled there

  many times, humble

  side streets & sweetness

  of figs, hot seasons of meat

  on the bone, naked feeling,

  & Dizzy’s horn still ablaze,

  a bleat of big fat notes

  in the dark. Even if I’d never

  stepped above simple laws,

  my youth had betrayed me

  with years still to come

  & jasmine in bloom.

  THE GREEN HORSE

  The kneeling figure is from Yama or Carthage,

  & I ask, What was his worth in gold, in salt,

  spices, statuary, or commemorated axioms?

  L, if we weren’t brave enough to believe

  we could master time, we wouldn’t have

  locked hands with old gods smelted down

  in shops where crosses were etched above doors,

  pressed into the coinage of a new empire,

  & palm readers flogged in the market.

  But of course there sits Marcus Aurelius

  with stoic meditations on a borrowed tongue,

  gazing out at sublime poppies, an eternal

  battlefield, his hand extended as a scepter

  over the piazza where his bronze horse

  cantered up onto Michelangelo’s pedestal

  carved from marble steps of the temple

  of Castor & Pollux, & we wait for him

  to outflank the epochs of wind & rain.

  L, everything around here is an epitaph.

  Even the light. This morning, squinting out

  a window as rays play off a stone cistern,

  I hear someone whisper, “Waste no time

  arguing about what a good man should be,

  the worms will give us their verdict

  by nightfall.” I don’t know who said this,

  but today, love, I’m brave enough to say,

  Antiquity, here’s my barbarian shadow

  squatting under the horse’s raised right hoof.

  ODE TO THE OUD

  Gourd-shaped muse swollen

  with wind in the mulberry,

  tell me everything you’re made of,

  little desert boat of Ra.

  Oblong box of Bedouin doves

  pecking pomegranate seeds out of the air,

  you’re the poet’s persona, his double

  in the high priest’s third chamber,

  each string a litany of stars over the Sahara.

  Pear-shaped traveler, strong but so light,

  is there a wishbone holding you together?

  I wish I knew how to open you up

  with an eagle’s feather or a pick

  whittled from buffalo horn,

  singing alive the dust of Nubia.

  Rosewood seasoned long ago,

  I wish I could close your twelve mouths

  with kisses. Tongues strung in a row,

  I wish I could open every sound in you.

  I envy one blessed to master himself

  by rocking you in his lonely arms.

  Little ship of sorrow, bend your voice

  till the names of heroes & courtesans,

  birds & animals, prayers & love songs,

  swarm from your belly.

  ENVOY TO PALESTINE

  I’ve come to this one grassy hill

  in Ramallah, off Tokyo Street,

  to place a few red anemones

  & a sheaf of wheat on Darwish’s grave.

  A borrowed line transported me beneath

  a Babylonian moon & I found myself

  lucky to have the shadow of a coat

  as warmth, listening to a poet’s song

  of Jerusalem, the hum of a red string

  Caesar stole off Gilgamesh’s lute.

  I know a prison of sunlight on the skin.

  The land I come from they also dreamt

  before they arrived in towering ships

  battered by the hard Atlantic winds.

  Crows followed me from my home.

  My coyote heart is an old runagate

  redskin, a noble savage, still Lakota,

  & I knew the bow before the arch.

  I feel the wildflowers, all the grasses

  & insects singing to me. My sacred dead

  is the dust of restless plains I come from,

  & I love when it gets into my eyes & mouth

  telling me of the roads behind & ahead.

  I go back to broken treaties & smallpox,

  the irony of barbed wire. Your envoy

  could be a reprobate whose inheritance

  is no more than a swig of firewater.

  The sun made a temple of the bones

  of my tribe. I know a dried-up riverbed

  & extinct animals live in your nightmares

  sharp as shark teeth from my mountains

  strung into this brave necklace around

  my neck. I hear Chief Standing Bear

  saying to Judge Dundy, “I am a man,”

  & now I know why I’d rather die a poet

  than a warrior, tattoo & tomahawk.

  TIMBUKTU

  I sing an elegy for the city of 333 saints,

  for every crumbling mosque & minaret,

  for the libraries standing for centuriesr />
  against dust storms, for the nomads

  herding trees of life across the desert

  along trails where camels hauled salt

  to rafts woven on the river Niger

  before the empire of Songhai fell.

  The griots speak of an epic memory

  of stardust in sand, but now mercenaries

  kidnap, run drugs, & kill in bold daylight.

  Blood money brought them into Libya,

  & more blood money took them home

  brandishing stolen guns & grenades.

  When Lord Byron intones in Don Juan

  “Where geography finds no one to oblige her”

  I hear my name. But no one stands up

  to prophecies the other side of limbo

  against the modern as a metallic eye

  drones overhead. Medieval clouds

  may promise safe passage or escape

  routes out of Mali, but the God-fearing

  cannot remember the faces of death

  after kicking in all the drums.

  GHAZAL, AFTER FERGUSON

  Somebody go & ask Biggie to orate

  what’s going down in the streets.

  No, an attitude is not a suicide note

  written on walls around the streets.

  Twitter stays lockstep in the frontal lobe

  as we hope for a bypass beyond the streets,

  but only each day bears witness

  in the echo chamber of the streets.

  Grandmaster Flash’s thunderclap says

  he’s not the grand jury in the streets,

  says he doesn’t care if you’re big or small

  fear can kill a man on the streets.

  Take back the night. Take killjoy’s

  cameras & microphones to the streets.

  If you’re holding the hand lightning strikes

  juice will light you up miles from the streets

  where an electric chair surge dims

  all the county lights beyond the streets.

  Who will go out there & speak laws

  of motion & relativity in the streets?

  Yusef, this morning proves a crow

  the only truth serum in the street.

  INTERROGATION

  He picks till it grows

  into a tiny butterfly,

  a transfigured bee-

  shaped wound,

  & then into a secret icon

  filled with belief,

  bloody philosophy,

  & a drop of stardust.

  A moment of half-

  dead radiance

  pulses on his skin

  till his mouth closes

  on a phrase in Latin,

  & he wonders if an oath

  leaves a scar.

  He can’t hear

  the nightlong voice

  recant in the bell tower,

  or the wasp’s torn wings

  lifting hints of light

  in the spider’s web.

  When thought is

  tissue, or a string

  of dust that sings for rain,

  unforgivable hours

  divide into testimonies

  delivered by the wind,

  saying, Forget.

  He tries not to pick

  at the mute evidence

  of the recent past,

  letting pop songs

  bleed over him

  on the radio.

  He lifts the scab

  with a fingernail,

  till the almost healed

  opens its little doubtful

  mouth of resignation,

  till he can gaze down

  into himself & see

  where eternity begins.

  PRECIOUS METALS

  After the MRI & robot

  made of precious metals,

  some heretical go-between

  shouted all the tautologies

  & fruitless apologies to the planet.

  I came to you, saying, Please

  look into my eyes & tap a finger

  against my heart to undo

  every wrong I’ve ever done,

  every infraction done to me

  in the country of crab apple

  & honeysuckle. I want to

  toy with each blade of grass

  & ripening plum, to suck the

  last salutation from doubt,

  & mount a dancer’s platform.

  I’ve outlived silent seasons

  whipped bloody & ransomed.

  But let us ride the big wheel

  into dawn, a naked kiss.

  I say, If you wish to trouble

  my persona or need to break

  my bones to show me mercy,

  then get on with your work

  & fix me the way a Delta blues

  fixes a muddy river’s night sky.

  A PRAYER

  Great Ooga-Booga, in your golden pavilion

  beside the dung heap, please

  don’t let me die in a public place.

  I still see the man on the café floor

  at the airport beneath a canopy

  of fluorescence, somewhere

  in the Midwest or back east,

  travelers walking around him

  & texting on cell phones

  while someone shocked him back,

  fiddling with dials & buttons

  on a miraculous instrument.

  Was the memory of a dress in his head?

  Great Ooga-Booga, forgive me

  for wearing out my tongue before

  I said your praises. No, I haven’t

  mastered the didgeridoo.

  I don’t have an epic as a bribe.

  My words are simple. Please

  don’t let me die gazing up at a streetlight

  or the Grand Central facades.

  Let me go to my fishing hole

  an hour before the sun sinks

  into the deep woods, or swing

  on the front porch, higher & higher

  till I’m walking on the ceiling.

  THE WORK OF ORPHEUS

  He blows a ram’s horn at the first gate of the third kingdom, & one would swear it sounds like questions in the air. He walks down a troubadour’s path that comes to a halt as if his song has broken in half, standing on cobblestones that stop before tall waves below. Whatever was here is now gone, except for a percussive whisper of mail & swords. He knows the sea is a keeper of records. Gazing up at the sun, he shakes his head & walks toward a refugee camp with a sack of beans, bread, dried tomatoes, & fish, where he plays “Hallelujah” on a toy trumpet. He knows they hate a bugle blown at dawn, or the sound of taps. A sloping path toward the center of town leads him to a prison made of river stones & thatch. The faces behind bars wait for him. Does he dare to raise his reed flute to his lips this mute hour? The sun sinks like a clarion, an old war cry across windy grass or questions in the air. He goes to the rear door of the slaughterhouse & plays his Pan fife till the flies go, as the workers speak of days they drank rose water. He heads down along the creek’s muddy bank, finds a fallen tree, sits, & raises the clay flute to his lips. A magpie lands on a branch a foot away. He stops playing, whispers to his messenger, Okay, now go out there & tell them.

  EMPYREAN ISLES

  We have gone there, sitting here

  while Herbie plays water on stone,

  his piano among the misty trees.

  Rainy light flows over hillocks

  beside the sea, leaves, & high grass,

  underneath nighttime till the Egg

  glows. A place becomes the shape

  of one’s mind, & secretive animals

  encounter us sleepwalkers. Dawn

  flows over round wooden cisterns

  atop buildings as East River fog

  journeys along the streets & avenues.

  All the seasons crowd here at once,

  & each has several minds. The boy

  never leaves the middle of m
y life.

  The firebirds eat clouds of insects

  as black keys counter white keys,

  & I beg you to sing me an old song.

  I weigh love of fruit in both hands.

  We’re two halves of a struck bell.

  The boy’s here, his big jolly balloon

  tugging me now & then off-balance.

  You wake me, laughing in your sleep.

  The roots are knotted underneath us.

  The boy smiles, & then dares me to kiss

  my left elbow. You are a double mirror

  guarding me from city lights & free will,

  & I’m too scared to let go of your voice

  in a subkingdom of mist on the stones.

  Damned if we do. Damned if we don’t.

  The LP spins nightlong on repeat.

  The boy has my long, girlish eyelashes.

  FROM

  REQUIEM

  So,

  when the strong unholy high winds

  whiplashed over the sold-off marshlands

  eaten back to a sigh of salt water,

  the Crescent City was already shook down to her pilings,

  her floating ribs, her spleen & backbone,

  left trembling in her Old World facades

  & postmodern lethargy, lost to waterlogged

  memories & quitclaim deeds,

  exposed for all eyes, damnable

  gaze, plumb line & heartthrob,

  ballast & water table,

  already the last ghost song

  gone, no more than a drunken curse

  among oak & sweet gum leaves, a tally

  of broken treaties & absences echoing

  cries of birds over the barrier islands

  inherited by the remittance man, scalawag,

  & King Cotton, & already the sky

  was falling in on itself,

  calling like a cloud of seagulls

  gone ravenous as the Gulf

  reclaiming its ebb & flowchart

  while the wind banged on shutters

  & unhinged doors from their frames

  & unshingled the low-ridged roofs

  while the arch-believers hummed

  “Precious Lord” & “Deep River”

  as the horsehair plaster walls

  galloped along with the surge,

  already folklore began to rise up

  from the buried lallygag & sluice

  pulsing beneath the Big Easy

  rolling between & through itself,

  caught in some downward tug

  & turn, like a world of love affairs

  backed up in a stalled inlet,

  a knelt-down army of cypress,