by Rita Dove
This is what you’re thinking. Thinking
drives you nuts these days, all that
talk about rights and law abidance when
you can’t even walk your own neighborhood
in peace and quiet, get your black ass gone.
You’re thinking again. Then what?
Matlock’s on TV and here you are,
vigilant, weary, exposed to the elements
on a wet winter’s evening in Florida
when all’s not right but no one sees it.
Where are they—the law, the enforcers
blind as a bunch of lazy bats can be,
holsters dangling from coat hooks above their desks
as they jaw the news between donuts?
Hey! It tastes good, shoving your voice
down a throat thinking only of sweetness.
Go on, choke on that. Did you say something?
Are you thinking again? Stop!—and
get your ass gone, your blackness,
that casual little red riding hood
I’m just on my way home attitude
as if this street was his to walk on.
Do you hear me talking to you? Boy.
How dare he smile, jiggling his goodies
in that tiny shiny bag, his black paw crinkling it,
how dare he tinkle their laughter at you.
Here’s a fine basket of riddles:
If a mouth shoots off and no one’s around
to hear it, who can say which came first—
push or shove, bang or whimper?
Which is news fit to write home about?
Aubade West
Ferguson, Missouri
Everywhere absence mocks me:
Jimmy, jettisoned like rotten fruit.
Franklin blown away.
Heat aplenty of all kinds,
especially when August blows its horn—
cops and summer and no ventilation
make piss-poor running buddies.
A day just like all the others,
me out here on the streets
skittery as a bug crossing a skillet,
no lungs big enough to strain
this scalded broth into brain and tissues,
plump my arteries, my soul . . .
Voice in my ear hissing Go ahead, leave.
Look around. No gates, no barbed wire.
As if I could walk on water.
As if water ever told one good truth,
lisping her lullabies as she rocks
another cracked cradle of Somalis
until it splits and she can pour
her final solution right through.
Me watching from the other side of the world,
high and dry on this street
running straight as a line of smack,
sun shouting down its glory:
No one’s stopping you.
What are you waiting for?
Naji, 14. Philadelphia.
A bench, a sofa, anyplace flat—
just let me down
somewhere quiet, please,
a strange lap, a patch of grass . . .
What a fine cup of misery
I’ve brought you, Mama—cracked
and hissing with bees.
Is that your hand? Good, I did
good: I swear I didn’t yank or glare.
If I rest my cheek on the curb, let it drain . . .
They say we bring it on ourselves
and trauma is what they feel
when they rage up flashing
in their spit-shined cars
shouting who do you think you are?
until everybody’s hoarse.
I’m better now. Pounding’s nearly stopped.
Next time I promise I’ll watch my step.
I’ll disappear before they can’t
unsee me: better gone
than one more drop in a sea of red.
Ghettoland: Exeunt
follow the morning star
Tell yourself it’s only a sliver of sun
burning into your chest, a cap of gold
or radiant halo justly worn by
the righteous at heart—
then take it off, stomp it, rip out the seams.
Wherever a wall goes up, it smolders.
Gate or street corner, buried canal—
you’ll catch yourself before crossing,
stumble over perfectly flat stones,
skirt the worn curb to avoid a cart
rumbling past three centuries ago.
You stop to gaze at the softening sky
because there is nowhere else to look
without remembering pity and contempt,
without harboring rage.
Spring Cricket
Nobody loves me
but the spring cricket.
—Aviva, age 5
The Spring Cricket Considers the Question of Negritude
I was playing my tunes all by myself;
I didn’t know anybody else
who could play along.
Sure, the tunes were sad—
but sweet, too, and wouldn’t come
until the day gave out: You know
that way the sky has of dangling
her last bright wisps? That’s when
the ache would bloom inside
until I couldn’t wait; I knelt down
to scrape myself clean
and didn’t care who heard.
Then came the shouts and whistles,
the roundup into jars, a clamber of legs.
Now there were others: tumbled,
clouded. I didn’t know their names.
We were a musical lantern;
children slept to our rasping sighs.
And if now and then one of us
shook free and sang as he climbed
to the brim, he would always
fall again. Which made them laugh
and clap their hands. At least then
we knew what pleased them,
and where the brink was.
The Spring Cricket Repudiates His Parable of Negritude
Hell,
we just climbed. Reached the lip
and fell back, slipped
and started up again—
climbed to be climbing, sang
to be singing. It’s just what we do.
No one bothered to analyze our blues
until everybody involved
was strung out or dead; to solve
everything that was happening
while it was happening
would have taken some serious opium.
Seriously: All wisdom
is afterthought, a sort of helpless relief.
So don’t go thinking none of this grief
belongs to you: Even if
you don’t know how it
feels to fall, you can get my drift;
and I, who live it
daily, have heard
that perfect word
enough to know just when
to use it—as in:
Oh hell. Hell, no.
No—
this is hell.
The Spring Cricket’s Grievance: Little Outburst
Tired of singing for someone else.
Tired of rubbing my thighs
to catch your ear.
When the sky falls tonight,
I’ll stand on my one
green leaf
and it will be my time,
my noise,
my ecstasy.
The Spring Cricket Observes Valentine’s Day
Twenty-four hours dedicated to the heart
and the heart in question a caricature
of something that never existed: half a butterfly
squeezing out of a lace-trimmed corset,
a fantasy floozy, dipped in red,
favorite color of the criminally insane.
Equally ferocious, this insistence
> that love resides in the chest,
when everyone knows it pitches itself
into ether. That’s why they speak of falling:
You step out without looking, and even
the best parts of you won’t hold you up.
Ah! The lobed boxes, the chocolates softly
sweating in their pleated wrappers,
the flowers trussed and crackling on doorsteps!
From my shrub I watch them navigate
the handover—eyes shining, kisses—
then send out my own Valentine
into the darkening meadow: one crimped note
scratched from two back legs, a spark
rubbed to flame; all that I cannot be
yearning for wings, their glazed flight
becoming all of me—which I give to you
wherever, whoever you are.
The Spring Cricket’s Discourse on Critics
Everybody’s got a song
they’ve gotta sing.
So they say. So they
think. Everybody’s got
a pair of fat thighs
they believe they can
just crush together
& crank out the golden
tunes, ye olde razzmatazz,
& the opposition will drop like—
no, I’m not going there.
I’m gonna sit here
awhile & watch the dew
drop: its letting go
so lurid a metaphor for Failure,
I can’t help but take it
out of circulation. Everybody’s
hungry, everybody’s hunkered
in their hedges, hanging on—
in the end nothing’s left
to talk about but Style.
Hip Hop Cricket
This ‘hood’s vast
and I’m its chief
sentinel, a natural
born horn.
I’m a clarion
nation, the itch
in heaven’s
evening clothes.
Where I’m from
ain’t no “my bad”—
I am bad: That’s
truth. So pony
up, falsettoed
crotch-grabbers, you
whistling wannabes,
and listen to
what’s real: I don’t
have to touch it
to know that it’s there.
Postlude
Stay by the hearth, little cricket.
Cendrillon
You prefer me invisible, no more than
a crisp salute far away from
your silks and firewood and woolens.
Out of sight, I’m merely an annoyance,
one slim, obstinate wrinkle in night’s
deepening trance. When sleep fails,
you wish me shushed and back in my hole.
As usual, you’re not listening: Time stops
only if you stop long enough to hear it
passing. This is my business:
I’ve got ten weeks left to croon through.
What you hear is a lifetime of song.
A Standing Witness
People are trapped in history
and history is trapped in them.
—James Baldwin
Beside the Golden Door
Prologue
Surely there must be something beautiful to smile upon—
the umbered blue edge of sky as it fades into evening,
the brusque green heave of the sea. When I
look up, surely there will be a cloud or a lone star
dangling. Truth is, the Truth has gone walking—
left her perch for the doves and ravens
to ravage, hightailed it to the hills, to the quiet
beyond rivers and trees. No matter
what ragged carnival may be thronging the streets,
what bleak homestead or plantation of sorrows
howling its dominion, Truth would say these are
arrogant times. Believers slaughter their doubters
while the greedy oil their lips with excuses
and the righteous turn merciless; the merciful, mad.
Your Tired, Your Poor . . .
FIRST TESTIMONY: 1968
Who comforts you now that the wheel has broken?
No more princes for the poor. Loss whittling you thin.
Grief is the constant now, hope the last word spoken.
In a dance of two elegies, which circles the drain? A token
year with its daisies and carbines is where we begin.
Who comforts you now? That the wheel has broken
is Mechanics 101; to keep dreaming when the joke’s on
you? Well, crazier legends have been written.
Grief is the constant now; hope, the last word spoken
on a motel balcony, shouted in a hotel kitchen. No kin
can make this journey for you. The route’s locked in.
Who comforts you now that the wheel has broken
the bodies of its makers? Beyond the smoke and
ashes, what you hear rising is nothing but the wind.
Who comforts you? Now that the wheel has broken,
grief is the constant. Hope: the last word spoken.
Bridged Air
SECOND TESTIMONY: 1969
Year of the moon, year of love & music:
Everyone in batik, dripping beads & good will;
peace to the world, peace to the Universe!
Sing along, kiss a stranger; blankets quilting the hill.
Three days of music—did you really imagine
this was all the excuse you would need?
Rain be damned; rock ‘n’ roll in the mud!
The bread can run low, but please not the weed—
then the last one steps onstage, fringed like a wild saint.
Do you see? he pleads. A scorched sound:
Hear it? Lost in combat, blind to love—your anthem
shredding the heavens as the bombs pour down.
Giant
THIRD TESTIMONY: Ali
Butterfly, butterfly on the wall
Can’t you hear your country call?
Black man’s got no business being
both pretty and bold—with a right hook
as swift as his banter, his feet
a flurry of insults, disguised as dance.
There’s a war going on, but he’s having
none of it. He flicks those angry eyes,
then flings out a rhyme
quick as tossing a biscuit to a dog.
He’s our homegrown warrior, America’s
toffee-toned Titan; how dare he swagger
in the name of peace? No black man
strutting his minstrel ambitions
deserves those eloquent lips:
Swat him down, pin him to the mat!
On and on they mutter, hellbent on keeping
their own destiny unscathed
& brazenly manifest.
Huddle
FOURTH TESTIMONY: Watergate
I’m not a crook he crowed, and people believed him,
persuaded by flags and honor guard;
that he had trusted his generals’ reports
did not justify terminating their trust in him,
leader of the free world balls-deep in the muck
of a war no one would claim to have started,
though everyone agreed it must be brought to an end
sooner rather than later. By any means necessary,
he was thinking, as he recorded another muddy deal,
then sent his plumbers out to plug the leaks.
Who wouldn’t prefer to be standing high and dry
with someone else’s fingers in the dike?
A little eavesdropping, a few ruffled papers
hardly constitutes a heist! Let’s call it a domestic incursion;
and that the facts have been brought to light
A crook is just a bend in the road not yet traveled—
he’s simply waiting for the smoke to clear.
Woman, Aflame
FIFTH TESTIMONY: Roe v. Wade
She was a mother. She was a girl who dreamed of becoming
a mother someday. She was either a tease or a tramp, a lover
or a wife—still she had to do the counting; was accused of
lacking spontaneity, being a cold-hearted bitch;
but if the days didn’t add up, she’d end up
straddling a cold table in a dingy back room
or waving Goodbye Future. She was jogging. On the late shift.
Unlocking her car. And though she still remembered
the tart smack of his sweat when he held her down,
horseradish on his tongue—
none of this was she permitted to say
while lawyers argued her right to privacy, citing
statute and precedent until the court declared Enough!
And she and her body were free to go.
Mother of Exiles
SIXTH TESTIMONY: The Iran Vigil
I wish I could describe how it felt to weather
the acetylene blare of their constant labor,
the bright chatter of Industry. Each day
the next card slipped into a disappearing deck;
each night dumped its used confetti at my feet
in grim, glittering heaps. But you’re not
interested. It’s your turn to watch as hours
flatten into days and weeks and months
until even the staunchest among you will crumble
when you catch yourself grabbing a beer
before settling down in front of the TV
where the countdown grows. Only then, perhaps,