I dreamed a pronouncement
about poetry and peace.

"People are violent,"
I said through the megaphone

on the quintessentially
frigid Saturday

to the rabble stretching
all the way up First.

"People do violence
unto each other

and unto the earth
and unto its creature.

Poetry," I shouted, "Poetry,"
I screamed, "Poetry

changes none of that
by what it says

or how it says, none.
But a poem is a living thing

made by living creatures
(live voice in a small box)

and as life
it is all that can stand

up to violence."
I put down the megaphone.

The first clap I heard
was my father's,

then another, then more,
wishing for the same thing

in different vestments.
I never thought, why me?

I had spoken a truth
offered up by ancestral dreams

and my father understood
my declaration

as I understood the mighty man
still caught in the vapor

between this world and that
when he said, "The true intellectual

speaks truth to power."
If I understand my father

as artist, I am free,
said my friend, of the acts

of her difficult father.
So often it comes down

to the father, his showbiz,
while the mother's hand

shapes us, beckons us
to ethics, slaps our faces

when we err, soothes
the sting, smoothes the earth

we trample daily, in light
and in dreams. Rally

all your strength, rally
what mother and father

together have made:
us on this planet,

erecting, destroying.

(At the same time, American paintings wherein
the biodynamic landscape explodes in flames,

ice, violent sunshine that seems to burn the canvas,
apocalyptic nature that roils and terrifies.

The Beautiful: small scale, gentle luminosity.
Sublime: territorial, vast, craggy, un-

domesticated, borderless, immense, unknown,
awful, monumental, transcendent, transcending.

Go West and West young man, to blinding snowstorms. Leave
shark-infested waters, shipwrecks without slaves.

Miraculous black holes of color large enough
to blot out the sun, obliterate the unending moans,

to exalt, to take the place of lamentation.)

1. Walking (1963)
after the painting by Charles Alston

You tell me, knees are important, you kiss
your elders' knees in utmost reverence.

The knees in this painting are what send the people forward.

Once progress felt real and inevitable,
as sure as the taste of licorice or lemons.
The painting was made after marching
in Birmingham, walking

into a light both brilliant and unseen.

3. 1968

The city burns. We have to stay at home,
TV always interrupted with fire or helicopters.
Men who have tweedled my cheeks once or twice
join the serial dead.

Yesterday I went downtown with Mom.
What a pretty little girl, said the tourists, who were white.
My shoes were patent leather, all shiny, and black.
My father is away saving the world for Negroes,
I wanted to say.

Mostly I go to school or watch television
with my mother and brother, my father often gone.
He makes the world a better place for Negroes.
The year is nineteen-sixty-eight.