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A Smokey
Slowdrag
By Melvin
E. Brown
just don't forget
the loving motion of romance
& be sure to give all that's
due
to the strength at the essence
of that good sweet style
past funky grinding thighs
beyond any nasty nigger slow dance
because back then
it was in the holding
it was in the holding
your hand on the small of her back
& Smokey was background
for her magic bodycup leaning
& she was fine as fine could
ever be
finer than shade & lemonade
she was so very fine
& you held her fragile
bodysigh
against the warm gust of wind
deep in your chest & Smokey
sang:
"I did you wrong
My heart went out to play
But in the game I lost you
What a price to pay"
& all the while
it was in the holding
it was in the holding
back then
it was in the way you held
her sweet precious lovely face
& full wet eyes
& it was in the way you held
those sad teargems
that fell
deep
into your young heart
& just don't forget . . . |
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Melvin E. Brown was born and raised in
Baltimore, Maryland. A graduate of the Johns Hopkins Writing
Seminars, Brown received his M.A. in 1977 to 1981. He was the
editor of Chicory Magazine, a publication of the Enoch
Pratt Free Library. he has also been a faculty member at
Sojourner Douglass College. His first volume of poetry In the
First Place was published in 1974. Most recently, his poetry
appeared in In Search of Color Everywhere: A Collection of
African American Poetry.
Blue Notes & Blessing
Songs
(Liberation House,1995) |
Reviews
Melvin follows the tradition:
griot, storyteller, musician. His poems are straight, clear
thinking. In the words of Etheridge Knight, he too "sees
through stone." Celebrate this new good book.—Lucille Clifton, Pulitzer Prize Nominee,
author of The Book of Light
Ooh, baby, baby--Melvin E. Brown,
at times, writes the way Smokey Robinson once sang. Brown's
latest volume is a book of remembrances. It's a collection of
poems "coated" with the blues and filled with a
special kind of love.—E. Ethelbert Miller, Director, African
American Resource Center, Howard University
It ain't just poetry to me. I hear
the codes for honest living, the quest to become a better human
being. I hear the love of friendship and memory, and the love of
memorable friendships. I feel the caring, the hurting, the
loving, the healing, the hoping. It's the heart-to-heart that's
really got a hold on me. Unh, unh, it ain't just poetry to me.—Peter J. Harris, author of Hand Me My
Griot Clothes: The Autobiography of Junior Baby
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The
Corner /
The Corner—DeAndre and Prop Joe
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The Corner—The Real Fran, DeAndre, Tyreeka and Blue!
The last ten minutes from the HBO
series
The Corner, where Charles S. Dutton, the
director talks to the real life characters, the story
was based on.
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Take This
Hammer
KQED's film unit
follows poet and activist James Baldwin in the spring of
1963, as he's driven around San Francisco to meet with
members of the local African-American community. He is
escorted by Youth For Service's Executive Director
Orville Luster and intent on discovering: "The real
situation of negroes in the city, as opposed to the
image San Francisco would like to present." He declares:
"There is no moral distance ... between the facts of
life in San Francisco and the facts of life in
Birmingham. Someone's got to tell it like it is. And
that's where it's at." Includes frank exchanges with
local people on the street, meetings with community
leaders and extended point-of-view sequences shot from a
moving vehicle, featuring the Bayview and Western
Addition neighborhoods. Baldwin reflects on the racial
inequality that African-Americans are forced to confront
and at one point tries to lift the morale of a young man
by expressing his conviction that: "There will be a
negro president of this country but it will not be the
country that we are sitting in now." The TV Archive
would like to thank Darryl Cox for championing the
merits of this film and for his determination that it be
preserved and remastered for posterity.
*
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Straight Outta Hunters Point /
Malcolm X Birthday (1970)
KQED News report
from May 19th 1970 on the Hunters Point community of San
Francisco's celebrations and remembrance for what would
have been the 45th birthday of political and human
rights activist Malcolm X. Features scenes of local
residents describing the personal impact that Malcom X
had on their lives and people enjoying live music. Ends
with views of public speakers addressing crowds outside
the Federal Courthouse in downtown San Francisco,
including the Reverend Cecil Williams who explains that:
"We are talking about the liberation of the people! And
that's what we want at this particular time."
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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Hopes and Prospects
By Noam Chomsky
In this urgent new book, Noam Chomsky
surveys the dangers and prospects of our
early twenty-first century. Exploring
challenges such as the growing gap
between North and South, American
exceptionalism (including under
President Barack Obama), the fiascos of
Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S.-Israeli
assault on Gaza, and the recent
financial bailouts, he also sees hope
for the future and a way to move
forward—in the democratic wave in Latin
America and in the global solidarity
movements that suggest "real progress
toward freedom and justice." Hopes and
Prospects is essential reading for
anyone who is concerned about the
primary challenges still facing the
human race. "This is a classic Chomsky
work: a bonfire of myths and lies,
sophistries and delusions. Noam Chomsky
is an enduring inspiration all over the
world—to millions, I suspect—for the
simple reason that he is a truth-teller
on an epic scale. I salute him." —John
Pilger
In dissecting the rhetoric and logic of
American empire and class domination, at
home and abroad, Chomsky continues a
longstanding and crucial work of
elucidation and activism . . .the
writing remains unswervingly rational
and principled throughout, and lends
bracing impetus to the real alternatives
before us.—Publisher's
Weekly
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
* * * * *
Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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1960
1965
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____ 2005
Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
update
5 January 2012
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