Eugene B. Redmond

POETIC REFLECTIONS ENROUTE TO, AND DURING, THE FUNERAL AND
BURIAL OF HENRY DUMAS,
POET

I
FLIGHT TO NEW YORK

"I am ready to die"
- Henry Dumas in
"Our King Is Dead," 1968.

A passive sea of white foam
Separates this swift and fleshless bird
From the black earth that waits for Henry Dumas, poet.
At 30,000 feet up
The mind has plenty of space to wander:

Just think!
A second-story world -
No steps, no ladders.
Meanwhile onto aluminum-covered wings the sun leaps
And breaks into a thousand heated needles
As my head averts,
With a twist,
Its stabbing, staring presence.

Now we soar through angry winds,
Bouncing unpredictably like a football
Turned loose in some smooth, open place.
But the pilot guides the bird cautiously
Through the ordeal while our hearts,
At first hung like anxious medallions around our necks,
Resume their natural places;

And the cries, before dignifiedly choked,
Die forever in our throats.

We the living:
Are we some majestic, royal party?
A high tribunal judging the lower world?
Gods? Goddesses?
Who is above and who is below?
... the pilot's voice and then
A view of Staten Island.
We nose through the second sea to caress LaGuardia Field.
The stewardess smiles at the passenger sitting
Alone in the rear: "Pretty good landing in the ram,
wasn't it?"
She's a company girl, the poet muses - a robot with nice
legs.
Parts and rhythms of the painful puzzle fall together on the
ground.
But I must hurry to the funeral in the Bronx.
Amid sounds and sights, I near the cab and am terrified
at my image
In the glossy surface of its wet body.

And on the way to McCall Funeral Home
I try in vain to figure out who I am.

II
THE FUNERAL

"A Black Poet is a preacher."
- Statement by Henry Dumas, 1968.

The balding black preacher
Read and ad-libbed
Before a lamp that threw
A cone-shaped light up into his face.
The eulogy was brief,
The man was eloquent and magnificent
In dark robes: a poet saluting a poet.
Occasionally his eyes fell
Like heavy weights
On the casket to his right,
Draped in a United States flag.
Dumas had served in the Air Force.
The articulate preacher had not known the poet
But the poet's mother.
One could see that the circumstances of the killing
Had undermined his faith.

He sought a way out: Equating the poet with "Mr.
Lincoln."
He also knew the poet wrote:
"This young man will survive
In his stories and poems," the bowed audience was
Reminded.
"He walked upright like a man...
There are mysteries; life is a mystery,
Death is a mystery."
The radiant black man of cloth
Was unpretentious; he broke with tradition - promising
No alternatives to death.
Seemingly unaware of heaven or hell, he suggested simply
"a last resting place."
Those in the chapel stared intently, bleakly
Into their own thoughts.
Outside the skies cried for the dead black bard.

III
FORTY-FIVE MINUTES TO THE CEMETERY

Rain,
Earlier in East St. Louis and now in New York.
The skies continue to mourn for the fallen poet and warrior,
Mojo-handler and prophet.
Four passengers in the fourth car,
Divided by a generation of intellect,
But feeling a common pain,
A mutual bewilderment:
Four grit faces of the oppressed.
The dead poet rode in the first car
But was present in the whole train:
Smiling in approval at our candid talk.
Dumas was like that. "Man, let's just tell it ," he used to say.
Yes, and he had given direction to the
Pen of the younger poet earler that morning
Several stories up, adrift in a big bird of steel.
Our talk was shop:
"Henry and I finished Commerce High School together,"
The driver intimated.
A middleage friend of the poet's mother said:
"They're killing off all our good men; I tell ya, a black man
Today speaks his piece at the risk of losing his life."

New Yorkers talk differently than East St. Louisans,
The younger poet observed to himself.

The cars of the procession,
Standing out with bright eyes against the dim day,
Sped cautiously toward Farmingdale National Cemetery
Where white marble headstones stood mute and macabre:
Quite geometrically arranged in a sprawling well kept
ocean of green.

Again talk: "They're slaughtering our boys in Vietnam,"
the middleage lady
Quipped; "this graveyard will be filled up soon."
A bus carrying the Army Honor Guard joined us at the
entrance to the cemetery.

The guard gave a trifling, sloppy salute to the fallen poet
Who had served his country.
More talk as we departed the graveside:
"Young David walks just like his daddy,"
The driver informed us about Dumas' eldest son.

"Neither of the boys understand what's going on,"
The driver's mother noted.
"Who does?" the young poet asked himself.
A confession from the middleage lady: "Can't cry no more.
Just won't no more tears come out - all dried up."
Her eyes looked like worn rubies, inquisitive jewels
Polished to worn perfection
By having seen many things
Including the dead poet's "good looking"
Remains.
The driver echoed her: "Henry was beautiful; he looked
Just like he was asleep."

The driver was a spirit lifter, also an interior observer:
"Henry thought too deep for the average person."

Upon leaving the cemetery
The procession broke up.
Cars bearing license plates from various places sped on or
turned off,
Went their way and my way.

The skies lifted their hung heads.
Mrs. Dumas smiled finally and played with her sons,
David and Michael.
The boys, cast in the same physical mold as their father,
Were impeccably dressed.

LOVE AS UPBRINGING

Where the willows drag the ground
And coal sheds
Slant tar-paper heads
Towards ring-wormed sunflower stalks,
My love grew
From a seed
Draped in a tear poised in my grand/mother's eye -
In East St. Louis,
In the saintlessness of slot-machines
In the ring of gunfire
In the cackle of hussies:
In beneath-the-bridge taverns
My boyhood notions
Were nudged, made adventurous,
By the pipe-puckered/snuff-stained
Lips of teethiess troubadors -
Strumming/strumming
Out their blemishes and boasts:
On gatemouth guitars and widowed washing boaitls -
In the southend with the roar of trains
Rushing through Rush City:
A crater,
A scowl of agony
On the face of a land
Saddled by the bridges of whitemen:
Bridges whose tracks /screeching & screeching/
Were long-play records fused from the fossils of Blackmen:
O the melody of freight!
In Beulahland
Where the dead died, often, at home
And the coffins lay open
In doily-decorated livingrooms:
My love, my hunger for chainless manhood upsoared!
In the shacks of my mind
In the vision of cotton-dresses
In my tattered totems of hope
My grandwise grandmother
My love grew from blisters
My love grew from sore rumps
My love outlined against the gutter-grim sunken streets
Against
The geniuses nodding
In unlabeled bottles.

© 1991/2005 by Eugene B Redmond

Cover Design: Joseph McNair