Caged Free...

Caged Free
“I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.” Paul Dirac, a founder of Quantum Mechanics

© 28 May 2014, the Griot Poet

Like a hit to the gut
And knife plunged to its hilt and twisted,
The news of your transition struck me, moved me…
Saline and histamine tracing its trail of tears down my cheeks,
I work nights…I needed to sleep (but could not).

You’d settled from Missouri to my hometown of Winston-Salem, NC
Taught at the namesake School of Fine Arts and Wake Forest
I met your beautiful niece (your twin) in Austin, Texas when she was a student at NC A&T
I had a squandered opportunity to meet you I’ll forever regret
As you make your way into the pantheon of greatness with Alex Hailey, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Shirley Chisolm, Henry Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Albert Einstein

I thank you

For singing past your muted silence,
For flying from your cage to freed verse,
For turning your pain into poetry
It made my own similar abuse – met out by an “uncle” – more tolerable.
Like you, I scribed my emotions and blues and songs and sonnets which I’ll wistfully esteem you now write on the tails of comets

Gone is our literary apothecary
Cursing to you was so undignified, and evidence of a lack of vocabulary

You could dress someone down with the boom of that distinctive voice
Dance with Amiri Baraka in memory of Langston Hughes…
Address poetry venues and presidential inaugurations “On the Pulse of Morning”
You qualified “our stories” as significant, despite countless debates of whether or not for reparations
The repair of our souls was in the courage you had to speak the truth of our history despite its harshness; its ugliness or the blowhards that labeled you “feminazi”
You met misogyny with dignity – ignoring the idiots as insignificant to your “phenomenal-ness”
Most deserving of medals, honors and accolades

Know this, like no other:
May is a bittersweet month for me
As in twenty days and five years space
I have lost
Two mothers….