tradition
henry 7. reneau, jr.
tradition
this story’s validity is intensified by the number of generations it took
to reach here;
this story, about prolonged suffering:
a stand of pink flamingos starving on nuclear-brown suburban lawns
grown sterile as the faint recitation of children’s voices
beyond the yellowed margins of obituaries
& singular prayer
reduced to whispered words after suffering—a couple of lines
stitched into tribulation, like a long wait for a train don’t come
during those moments
when we fled to the cliff’s edge & exhaled
a three-day-old sweat of frustration frowning into us,
dis-remembering
an equatorial sweetness pushing through our veins
& a Middle Passage on the horizon,
portending all the myriad horrors one should never see
—like Jesus walking on jazz is how we once knew black,
the cogs, wheels & spindles of a great manipulated dynamic--
the life of things now given over to economic truth bound by religion
& less than
emphasized by the clinical calculations of academia,
all that is heard is a keening sound
spinning federal-green dreams of Freedomland, a nocturnal stalker,
silently purring blind hope on small feline feet,
as in, heathen sinner born again to suffer now-greater later
—the missing shade, a lily-white variable that niggers a personality,
breeding architects of our own self-destruction--
& headlines read:
ICE-BOX KILLER CLAIMS EIGHTH
& here come 5-0 gangbangers under color of long-arm Johnny Law,
a thin blue line between ballin’ & 25 to life, roamin’ ghetto streets,
circlin’ the block, searchin’ my niggas’ inside out, pullin’ nines
& knots
out they pockets & they socks, findin’ dope, whether theirs
or not--
as uptown white collar dumps ninth in vacant lot
Note: quoted fragment from “The Mingus Effect” by Wanda Coleman