Poems

Black Boy Sings The Blues

Posted on June 3, 2015 by A. Long

in the piazza square

among the bustling streets

where industry and avenues meet

where the homely or happy greet

anxious merchants

hangs a sound above the noise

wailing in the top ground

like a rhythm blues booze hound

calling for the freedom he’s never known

He sings of love lost

and a few dollars are pried from strangers passing by

alerted by his cries

He sings

of oceans swelling and dreams so loudly

it carries over the now whispering crowds

until it resonates through his sneakers and into the concrete

a conduit for his melodic screams

He continues to sing as if music were the only thing

keeping his heart from bursting

or the Earth rotating

What kind of fool do you take me for he says

and I need you he says

until his street chalice runneth over with imparted gold nuggets

and then black boy packed up his carryings

abandoning us in his blues

while we bid him sing

My Baby

Posted on June 2, 2015 by A. Long

my baby’s got an off color way about things

he don’t like people

or festivals or parades

or house parties or prisons for that matter

he’s got a look that’d turn you to stone if you let it

but if oceans were dark brown ‘stead of blue

they’d be his eyes

he’d swallow whiskey before water

but that mouth can form the sweetest words ever said

and I love him from the crust between his toes

to the top of his head

we’so tight

that I can tell when he changes his mind about his favorite color

or uses different soap

when he loses hope

if he’s broke without needin’ healing

if he’s hurt but wantin’ fixing

when he bleeds

what he dreams

but most importantly, if i’m what he needs

and if I should let him go

Shugar,

ain’t that love?

he dreamed of a place
past the moons
and cuckolds of his heart
where he and his lady could bask
in the warped rhapsody of their love
a story told an untold times
mounted against him
So he waited
strangled by principle
he waited for the revolution
to scream aloud with his bloody fist
in the air, in the name of all he held dear
for the sins to be unearthed
to labor for his children
and die a warrior
He waited for danger
to kill and spite his country
a gladiator in another time with another her
If only she were aware of the way he’d
bare knuckled three armed guards outside
her bedroom window
or how he stayed up all night
tending the fires so that she’d never know cold
or loneliness
but it never came
It passed him over in every century
a philosopher a teacher an artist
a woman an apprentice a poet
a lawyer a father a nurse
a dancer a devil a leader and a criminal
all couldn’t break character
not even for an instant did he
dispel a silent oath for anarchy
He perished unfulfilled and unsung
for generations
wondering what he had done
why visions of valor never came to be
why he needed the fight
why he dreamed of this
lady’s beauty
every night

The Peace of Wild Things

Posted on June 1, 2015 by A. Long

Bruce Onobrakpeya

When despair grows in me

and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting for their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

— by Wendell Berry

Unsung Song

Posted on May 17, 2015 by A. Long

The world changed.
Books disappeared, replaced
by glowing screens.
Poems that mattered once
were gently laid to rest.
Once, the summer was
the summer, the fall the fall.
Outside, cars sat quietly at the curb,
puffy like soft sculptures,
or finned like giant fish.
Mornings, afternoons,
a boy on a bicycle delivered
news of the world.
Then suddenly it all ended.
There was only the present
looping continuously on a screen,
but you couldn’t make sense of it.

Outside people still jogged,
walked their dogs, coffee
in one hand, a phone in the other.
Holding bright little gods,
they texted and twittered.
Vainly, you tried to recall
when everything had mattered,
when the summer was the summer,
the fall the fall. When people stood
on the sidewalk in the cool
of the evening quietly talking.
When a rolled newspaper hit
the door, mornings, afternoons,
delivered by a boy on a bicycle.
Whatever had happened,
had happened overnight.

You open your mouth.
You open your mouth.
Although there is nothing
to sing about, you sing.

–by Elizabeth Spires

Poems