There’s dust, a scratch in a groove,
and here we are repeating
the same two seconds of “Strange Fruit.”
It’s the same sound from the 78 rpm
to the vintage vinyl to which we listen
in our apartments, where we return
bruised and bloodied and beaten,
unrecognizable in our mothers’ arms,
if we find the right path back to them.
All our lives we’ve cried a rallying cry,
from the river, from the water wanting
baptism, a rebirth to an earth
where it wasn’t dangerous to be
young and gifted and us—slinging
school bags over shoulders—where
we could go to church and
little Black girls could remain
little Black girls
not only in memoriam.
Through a liturgy, no,
a litany, we learned to pray.
Warriors taught us
to dance through minefields—
pirouette and grand jeté a revelation
in the face of annihilation,
bouquets blossoming
between cracks in concrete.
In pressed page
and in song
and on stage,
we felt the weight
of sun and rainbows and shade,
patient tenderness and pennilessness,
felt a rhapsody reverberate our ribcages.
The good Lorde told us
we weren’t meant to survive,
but we’ve always been good
at going about our lives
in factories and on our knees
in houses we cleaned
with tables at which
we would never eat.
But still we fell in line,
took to boot, tank, and sky.
In Busan, in Ardennes, in Hue,
young men threw themselves
over booby trap and grenade
never to return to an ostensible parade.
Strangers in a homeland
still no man’s—
the barbed lancets of a bee.
But, still, there was honey.
There were arias and
Chisholm-chiseled sightlines
as the tale of our roots writhed.
So we broke step
as we dreamed dreams
deferred again and again,
as we congregated
over hot buttered toast,
took our seats at the table,
called on our mothers
to grease and braid hair of babes,
as we curled close together
in Harlem and Trenton
on nights alight with our injuries.
To the disquieting phrasing
of Black bodies swinging,
we still curl close
to loved ones
in different cities,
teach our children
their ABCs and 123s,
how to pas de bourrées
and kick-ball-change,
as we work to lift
our fists, the needle,
put on a new record to play.