With Wings As Eagles

"They say the people could fly.  Say that long ago in Africa, some of the people knew magic.  And they would walk up on the air like climbin up on a gate.  And they flew like blackbirds over the fields.  Black, shiny wings flappin against the blue up there."

 ~The People Could Fly, Virginia Hamilton

I recently asked you a question.  I did not ask the question to receive an answer.  I already knew the answer.  But I only knew the answer on this plane of existence, the flesh.  Sincere action (or lack thereof) is ALWAYS the exception to the rule; claims of love… interest… care.  I had ground-level awareness.  I had not come into the fullness of such an uncomfortable truth.  So I asked the question to move upward, to gain strength in the struggle.  If I am going to get there I must lift myself.  Home is not of this world but of the Ether.  It is above this want for human validation.  There is no peace here in this base desire, allowing someone else’s lack of understanding to necessitate… me.  I must.  I must lift myself higher.  So I asked the question to finally own this stronghold, to finally own the part I willingly played in my own enslavement and in owning it unlink myself from the chain of your reach.  I invited your answer… invited its pain to grow.  You were selfish and I made myself low.  I forgive you.  I forgive me.  Thank you, I am stronger now. 

I love you but I have no intention of staying here with you.  Here is not my truth.  And dishonesty is the utmost sin… it the source from which perversion, wickedness and unrighteousness flows.  Shall I continue in iniquity?  Will Grace abound in a lie?  Home is not here but of the Amen.  I'm going home and my journey is in the sky. 

So today is the day that I make myself free from the bondage of your clasped hand around my ankle.  I will shake loose of your grip and ascend toward my mark… my prize… my calling.  Today.  Today I will indeed shake free.  Get thee behind me… loose here.  I do not belong to you… loose here.  By the Power… loose here.  By the Glory… loose here.   By God… loose here.  I do not belong to you.  I do not belong to you.  LOOSE HERE…   

A bit of magic, African mystery to lift my people to Love, to life more abundantly...

 "Kum... yali, kum buba tambe!" 

              

A Requiem For Trayvon Martin

Jehovah Gmolah, my spirit is grieved… 

There are no colored boys who are allowed

To ease the crystal stair of American fancy. 

The wood-bare ladder that has been unceremoniously afforded to you

Is seemingly bereft of angels. 

Where is your portion of good? 

Do they not know – are you not a child of God, too? 

Woe has become me. 

I do not dare look upon

The empty cradle in your eyes.  

Your innocence has been snatched by those who slither 

With calculated stealth. 

In the nocturnal hour they swallow our young whole.

Who will inform the scattered remnant 

If little Jeremiah is snuffed out as our lids are drawn closed?

Why is my subconscious beset with genocidal nightmares?

Woe has become me.

A man child slain before his prophetic voice is able to reach a rich bass.

We are a forgetful people,

Amnesiacs with unknown magic in their skin.

The beast knows this.

So it devours you in the night my Abel as me and Adam sleep.

My ears bleed at the sound of a hissing hushabye– POP POP POP!

Woe has become me

Lull me no more America

Lull my black boy away from me no more.

Remembering mine affliction and my misery, the wormwood and the gall. My soul hath them still in remembrance, and is humbled in me. This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope. It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not.  They are new every morning. 

~Lamentations 3:19-23  

Insomnia Is My Baby's Daddy!

This is one of many zygotes conceived in the lust of  the dream to write a novel...one day (long sigh).  The concept I envisioned was a love story with a feel like the movie "Love & Basketball" only exchanging the basketball for church.  My main character/speaker is a woman with an agnostic belief system.  I like her a lot so far but I 'm not sure if I  will have the chance to hang out with her in the future...another one to be kept in gestation until I'm ready to push.

My infatuation started when I was eight.  I would sit in a maple wood, yellow cushioned pew gazing with long affection at my cousin as she sang with innocent jubilee in the New Clint Baptist Church choir.  They were a small bunch.  An open call banding of precious, tender eyed girls and bored, lazy lipped boys who had been coerced through biblically backed suggestion to render their reasonable service to the sunshine choir.  I adored watching all of their faces even the stone faces of the mute boys.  I envied their affiliation to something bigger than their individual selves.

I am thirty now with a hard won perspective on my previous relationships.  It is an outlook that would garner vehement disdain from most but I maintain my stance nonetheless because its mine.  My only loyalty lies in the spirit of what is true for me.  Agency - "for ye are gods, children of the Most High." I am no saint but what I do claim to be is a god in my own right - creator and proprietor over the course of my life.  This takes courage.  It is a singular practice in consistently ascending beyond the crucifixion of others expectations - a kind of violence that for most begets a kind of Stockholm effect of aligning with the captors of your true self.  It takes courage to escape.  But it is a fortitude that takes years to construct.  It is definitely a work – building brick by red brick.

I met him in college.  He was the affectionate jock in my English 101 class.  He moved from classmate to classmate with ease in the anxious minutes before the tolling bell of the professor’s voice initiated the clamor of ball point pens buzzing in between red margins and blue lines.  And when class ended he managed to delightfully reconcile every conversation he began in the eve minutes of class.  In this he exuded a methodical amiableness.  A personable character motivated by the foreknowledge of how small talk now makes for big connections post grad.  But what most people saw was a jock which equals simpleton in the stereotype ravaged minds of most.  But what I suspected was that he was a clandestine savant.  A trickster posing as the unassuming scarecrow who all along had a brain.  But this notion rested on the fence of maybe, possibly.  I too held loose thoughts of how he would flunk out when his body or eligibility no longer served the agenda of the club.  He shamed the doubting Thomas in me with our first conversation…

"And the LORD answered me, and said, Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it. For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak, and not lie: though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry."

~Habakkuk 2: 2-3