The Penguin Book of American Verse
Page 46
I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat moustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You –
Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who
Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I’m finally through.
The black telephone’s off at the root,
The voices just can’t worm through.
If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two –
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.
There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.
The Applicant
First, are you our sort of a person?
Do you wear
A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,
A brace or a hook,
Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,
Stitches to show something’s missing? No, no? Then
How can we give you a thing?
Stop crying.
Open your hand.
Empty? Empty. Here is a hand
To fill it and willing
To bring teacups and roll away headaches
And do whatever you tell it.
Will you marry it?
It is guaranteed
To thumb shut your eyes at the end
And dissolve of sorrow.
We make new stock from the salt.
I notice you are stark naked.
How about this suit –
Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.
Will you marry it?
It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof
Against fire and bombs through the roof.
Believe me, they’ll bury you in it.
Now your head, excuse me, is empty.
I have the ticket for that.
Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.
Well, what do you think of that?
Naked as paper to start
But in twenty-five years she’ll be silver,
In fifty, gold.
A living doll, everywhere you look.
It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk, talk.
It works, there is nothing wrong with it.
You have a hole, it’s a poultice.
You have an eye, it’s an image.
My boy, it’s your last resort.
Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.
The Arrival of the Bee Box
I ordered this, this clean wood box
Square as a chair and almost too heavy to lift.
I would say it was the coffin of a midget
Or a square baby
Were there not such a din in it.
The box is locked, it is dangerous.
I have to live with it overnight
And I can’t keep away from it.
There are no windows, so I can’t see what is in there.
There is only a little grid, no exit.
I put my eye to the grid.
It is dark, dark,
With the swarmy feeling of African hands
Minute and shrunk for export,
Black on black, angrily clambering.
How can I let them out?
It is the noise that appals me most of all,
The unintelligible syllables.
It is like a Roman mob,
Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!
I lay my ear to furious Latin.
I am not a Caesar.
I have simply ordered a box of maniacs.
They can be sent back.
They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner.
I wonder how hungry they are.
I wonder if they would forget me
If I just undid the locks and stood back and turned into a tree
There is the laburnum, its blond colonnades,
And the petticoats of the cherry.
They might ignore me immediately
In my moon suit and funeral veil.
I am no source of honey
So why should they turn on me?
Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.
The box is only temporary.
Blackberrying
Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,
Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,
A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea
Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries
Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes
Ebon in the hedges, fat
With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers.
I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me.
They accommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their sides.
Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks –
Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky.
Theirs is the only voice, protesting, protesting.
I do not think the sea will appear at all.
The high, green meadows are glowing, as if lit from within.
I come to one bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies,
Hanging their bluegreen bellies and their wing panes in a Chinese screen
The honey-feast of the berries has stunned them; they believe in heaven.
One more hook, and the berries and bushes end.
The only thing to come now is the sea.
From between two hills a sudden wind funnels at me,
Slapping its phantom laundry in my face.
These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.
I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me
To the hills’ northern face, and the face is orange rock
That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space
Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths
Beating and beating at an intractable metal.
Etheridge Knight 1933–1991
Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane
Hard Rock was ‘known not to take no shit
From nobody’, and he had the scars to prove it:
Split purple lips, lumped ears, welts above
His yellow eyes, and one long scar that cut
Across his temple and plowed through a thick
Canopy of kinky hair.
The WORD was that Hard Rock wasn’t a mean nigger
Anymore, that the doctors had bored a hole in his head,
Cut out part of his brain, and shot electricity
Through the rest. When they brought Hard Rock back,
Handcuffed and chained, he was turned loose,
Like a freshly gelded st
allion, to try his new status.
And we all waited and watched, like indians at a corral,
To see if the WORD was true.
As we waited we wrapped ourselves in the cloak
Of his exploits: ‘Man, the last time, it took eight
Screws to put him in the Hole.’ ‘Yeah, remember when he
Smacked the captain with his dinner tray?’ ‘He set
The record for time in the Hole – 67 straight days!’
‘O! Hard Rock! man, that’s one crazy nigger.’
And then the jewel of a myth that Hard Rock had once bit
A screw on the thumb and poisoned him with syphilitic spit.
The testing came, to see if Hard Rock was really tame.
A hillbilly called him a black son of a bitch
And didn’t lose his teeth, a screw who knew Hard Rock
From before shook him down and barked in his face.
And Hard Rock did nothing. Just grinned and looked silly,
His eyes empty like knot holes in a fence.
And even after we discovered that it took Hard Rock
Exactly 3 minutes to tell you his first name,
We told ourselves that he had just wised up.
Was being cool; but we could not fool ourselves for long,
And we turned away, our eyes on the ground. Crushed.
He had been our Destroyer, the doer of things
We dreamed of doing but could not bring ourselves to do,
The fears of years, like a biting whip,
Had cut grooves too deeply across our backs.
Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) 1934–
Horatio Alger Uses Scag
Kissinger has made it, yall. He’s the secretary
of state, U.S.A. The anglo-snakes have called him
mooing to their side, his bag-time with rocky helped
a lot. His ol lady, was once, they say, rocky’s main
squeeze … intellectually. But Henry, the k, pushes through
his dangerous glasses. His wine smile sloshes back and forth
he’s thinking, as he speaks. A fast man on his feet. The subject,
a cold threat to the a-rabs (it makes him feel vaguely nationalistic,
but not in an irresponsible way, him bein a jew and all
ya know) … but they hired him not for his jewishness ‘grrr … he sd
what is that,’ but for his absolute mastery of the art of
bullshitting
And so, he lays it all out
across the U.N. decks for all
to hear, and be afraid. His freckles, even,
show, so synonymous with america is this
fat priapic mackman
A-rabs, he says, you betta
be cool with that oil & shit
& beyond us all, you cdda laught
is the realization that the shadowy figure
in the arab getup, is yo man, rocky, makin
the whole thing
perfect
At the National Black Assembly
‘EEK
a nigger
communist,” the lady democrat
nigrita squeeked, eek
an ‘avowed”
nigger
communist, & almost swooned
except you cd hear static chattering
from her gold necklace chairman
Strauss dialing trying to get through
her papers spilled
& the autographed picture
of Teddy K. & Georgie W.
hugging each other in
the steam bath
fell out.
You see she
say I cant not be
you see
with you niggers
with no nappy head commie
America’s been good
to me. The democrats, God
bless’ em, have allllllllways
done good
by us
by colored folks
you see she say I studied
commies, them Chinese maoists
specially (She scooped her papers
up & thought deliciously
about the time her man
Scoop J & she licked on the same ice
cream
cone
right down to the hairs!
Specially them
Maoists, I studied
They tacktix
She say, They tacktix
is to take over
the microphone &
be against the
democrats)
sweeping out
wrist radio tittering
Strauss waltzes &
Proposed ripoffs
Straight from Watergate
Going to the airport
interviewed by WLIE
She smiled powdering her
conversation
& caught a plane
to
petit bourgeois
negro
heaven
Richard Emil Braun 1934–
Goose
Trailing her father, bearing his hand axe,
the girl thought she had never
guessed what earthly majesty
was before
then, as he strode unconcernedly
holding a vicious gander
by the horny mitts and let
the big wings
batter his knees. She was also surprised
to feel a liberating
satisfaction in the coming
bloodshed, and
that notwithstanding all the times she had
been beleaguered and
had fled, today she did not fear
the barnyard hubub.
Yet, as her father’s clever stroke fell, as
the pronged head skipped sideways
and the neck plumes stiffened with blood
from the cleft,
she was angry; and, when the headless goose
ran to the brook and was
carried off into the woods alive,
she rejoiced,
and subsequently frequented those woods
and avoided her father.
When the goose began to mend she
brought him small
hominy, which was welcome though she had
to press the kernels one
by one into the pink neck that
throbbed into
her palm; when haemorrhage occurred she would
not spare handkerchiefs,
and stanching the spot she felt a thrill
of sympathy.
But for the most part there was steady progress,
and growing vigor was
accompanied by restlessness,
and one cool day
the blind thing was batted out of existence
by a motorcycle.
She had no time for tears. She ran
upstairs to miss
her father’s barytone commiseration,
then out onto the fields,
and, holding an old red pinwheel,
ran ran ran ran.
Robert Mezey 1935–
My Mother
My mother writes from Trenton,
a comedian to the bone
but underneath, serious
and all heart. ‘Honey,’ she says,
‘be a mensch and Mary too,
its no good to worry, you
are doing the best you can
your Dad and everyone
thinks you turned out very well
as long as you pay your bills
nobody can say a word
you can tell them to drop dead
so save a dollar it can’t
hurt – remember Frank you went
to highschool with? he still lives
with his wife’s mother, his wife
works while he writes his books and
did he ever sell a one
the four kids run around naked
36 and he’s never had,
you’ll forgive my expression
even a pot to piss in
or a window to throw it,
such a smart boy he couldnt
read the footprints on the wall
honey you think you know all
the answers you dont, please try
to put some money away
believe me it wouldn’t hurt
artist shmartist life’s too short
for that kind of, forgive me,
horseshit, I know what you want
better than you, all that counts
is to make a good living
and the best of everything,
as Sholem Aleichem said
he was a great writer did
you ever read his books dear,
you should make what he makes a year
anyway he says some place
Poverty is no disgrace
but its no honor either
that’s what I say,
love,
Mother’
Sonia Sanchez 1935–
TCB
wite/motha/fucka
wite/motha/fucka
wite/motha/fucka
whitey.
wite/motha/fucker
wite/motha/fucker
wite/motha/fucker
ofay.
wite/mutha/fucka
wite/mutha/fucka
wite/mutha/fucka
devil.
wite/mutha/fucker
wite/mutha/fucker
wite/mutha/fucker
Pig.
wite/mother/fucker
wite/mother/fucker
wite/mother/fucker
cracker.
wite/muther/fucka
wite/muther/fucka
wite/muther/fucka
honky.
now. that it’s all sed
let’s get to work.
Right on: white america
this country might have
been a pio
neer land
once.
but. there ain’t
no mo
indians blowing
custer’s mind
with a different
image of america.
this country
might have
needed shoot/
outs/ daily/
once.
but. there ain’t
no mo real/ white/ allamerican
bad/guys,
just.
u & me.
blk/ and un/armed.
this country might have
been a pion
eer land. once.
and it still is.
check out
the falling
gun/shells on our blk/tomorrows.
Diane Wakoski 1937–
The Father of My Country