Don’t Walk
Crosswalks don’t have word-signs
anymore—something about illiteracy
and more and more people who come
here unable to read or speak English
like most of us who’ve been
here too long.
If you don’t understand “Don’t Walk”
you’ll understand this:
a red hand appears,
flashes three times
freezes in mid air just before
cars whiz by like flies
after a cow in the country.
When it’s time to leave the curb,
a naked white man makes the hand
disappear, like Indians in America—
appears to walk fast like time,
lets everyone know
who’s in charge.
|
A Poet and a
Poetry to Reckon With
A Review by Rudolph
Lewis
ChickenBones Best Poetry Book of 2008
Mary E. Weems.
An Unmistakable Shade of Red and the Obama
Chronicles.
Huron: Ohio: Bottom Dog
Press, 2008.
Writing
poetry, Mary E. Weems pares down sociology to the
social, to ancestors beginning with the stories of
grandma and granny, to mama saying everything
changes nothing, and daddy face down in the
mud, to the self, a hole within a hole. Ideology is
peeled down to the personal, to a tangerine attitude
that engages the struggle to find meaning and play
in the midst of absence and loss.
An Unmistakable Shade of Red and the Obama
Chronicles is a poetic tour de force,
an act against erasure or again in the words
of E. Ethelbert Miller, a “spiritual text” that outs
deceptions and applauds change that moves us to
higher ground.
Weems brings into focus
scenes of our lives we “don’t need an expert to
identify,” not only the abuse and rape of women and
children, but also the ordinary and the great.
There’s “a sistah” who waits tables with a “broken
mouth smile.” There’s God in an unemployment line,
where “patience drops on a counter/like a rock.” The
problem of illiteracy within our communities is
noted in which “crosswalks don’t have word signs.”
There’s the shock of the beautiful and successful
Phyllis Hyman (1949-1995). “In between songs she
talks of life . . . several days later she ended a
life I would have sworn was just beginning.”
History and the
a-historical rather than erased are presented in
delightful wordplay, especially in the use of Eugene
Redmond’s poetic form, the Kwansaba. As in “Brother
Wright . . . argues with God for forty cloud acres”
and June Jordan dumps “word bombs . . . on all the
ways the world needs to collect / rain change” and
James Brown “writes freedom on wings” with “funk
cologne.” In Weems’ poetry, the struggle for justice
and hope is relentless. In “Young men with no legs,”
a “black man walks time / each day another chance at
chance.”
Weems’ technique in
writing poetry is what most appeals. Nothing is
superfluous. She strips down not just for precision
but also for pleasing riffs and rhythms. When I read
her poems I am encouraged to go back and take a
second look at my own poems that tend to mean more
with less. The starkness of her poems, the absence
of watery sentimentalism in word choices, is filled
with pleasing surprises and little shocks of
imaginativeness. Weems’
An Unmistakable Shade of Red and the Obama
Chronicles teaches as well inspires; a book
of poems that will provoke many, many readings.
Weems’ approach to poetry
gains its most focus in the latter third of the
book, the “Obama Chronicles,” when she hones in on
the earth shaking impact and possibility of a “real”
black president. This section gathers up all the
devices used in the preceding section of the book.
For she creates these poems out of memories and
experiences of family and community, out of play and
that which gives black life its distinctiveness.
There’s the daughter who “grew up with Black
history/in the house like another family/member.”
There’s Martin, Malcolm, and Moms Mabley, in heaven,
listening to “debates in barber and beauty shops.”
Overall, it’s the sideways
look that Professor Weems takes toward life that
really intrigues. The last line of her poem “Nomination,”
brings that in view. She says, “It’s not/hate we’re
afraid of, its what hate can do/to a moment.”
