Resting Giants

It's Friday, and I am pretty exhausted from my day of parenting and householding. So, for your Friday night enjoyment, I give you, instead of my muddled thoughts, the very fine words of the late and great Amiri Baraka, passed at 79 yesterday. He was, is a giant of poetry, of justice, a voice I heard and try to hear, still, to learn and take in the truth he laid down with every verse. Rest in power.


Ka'Ba
A closed window looks down
on a dirty courtyard, and Black people
call across or scream across or walk across
defying physics in the stream of their will.

Our world is full of sound
Our world is more lovely than anyone's
tho we suffer, and kill each other
and sometimes fail to walk the air.

We are beautiful people
With African imaginations
full of masks and dances and swelling chants
with African eyes, and noses, and arms
tho we sprawl in gray chains in a place
full of winters, when what we want is sun.

We have been captured,
and we labor to make our getaway, into
the ancient image; into a new

Correspondence with ourselves
and our Black family. We need magic
now we need the spells, to raise up
return, destroy, and create. What will be

the sacred word?

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