Eugene B. Redmond

BALLAD OF BLACK/ESSENCE

For Joseph Harrison

Firstforce or earth-driven godman; globe-song:
Dance-embroidered in rhythmtree;
Flame/ever inside blood, inside raindrops;
Phono-song from a phono-sea.

Drumgirl, horizon-child: sprite moondancer!
Fleshtorch, essence and jeweiskin:
Comming/coming strongsong, blues-laced and black:
Deftly making words out of wind.

Landlaced man, mud-docked and waterwaziy,
Oh steel that walks, that swims, that flies!
Softstone with armor to endure: to lure;
Flowers inside iron: inside eyes!

Fleet/force, redemptive strength, precious muscle:
Essence, the blackline and the core:
Beauty /yes/ vim-vexed and fire within fire
That flares up! frames and fans the shore:

That flares up! enflames the shore of seacoals;
Giving and summoning the seed
Of light, sun, flamedances on rockshoulders:
Burning and branding in our need;
Burning and branding in our need.

SPRING IN THE JUNGLE

You tiptoed
Naked
Into the
Jungle
Of my soul;

And the underbrush
Divided before
You.

A choir of birds
Grew
Understandably
Silent;

And I stood
Beside
Myself with joy
And watched
The season grow
To
Spring

Let my soul
Be always
Green
And sprinkled with
Daisies;

Let there be
Dew for the sun to bathe in
And winds to do rituals
For the
Moon.

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 boards
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 Beulahiand
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