Lucille Clifton, born 1936 – died 2010

“Her leadership during her years as chancellor of the American Academy of Poets and her position as Maryland’s Poet Laureate contributed to her role as one of the 20th Century’s premiere poets.”

—from Study.com

In last week’s poem Gwendolyn Brooks wrote of the mother of her slain son with the subtitle in parentheses (after the murder, after the death). She allowed photographs of her slain son in his coffin to be taken so the world could see what had been done to him.

In today’s poem, Lucille Clifton speaks in the voice of the slain man, James Byrd Jr. in 1998. When his murderers did not succeed in lynching/hanging him, they dragged his body on a rope down the road in their car, pulling Byrd behind them.

The poem captures the gruesome horror of Byrd’s death. The punctuation and capitalization is Lucille Clifton’s.

“jasper texas 1998”

for j. byrd

“i am a man’s head hunched in the road.

i was chosen to speak by the members of my body.

the arm as it pulled away pointed toward me,

the hand opened once and was gone

why and why and why

should I call a white man brother

who is the human in this place,

the thing that is dragged or the dragger?

what does my daughter say?

the sun is a blister overhead.

if it were alive I could not bear it.

the townsfolk sing we shall over come

while hope bleeds slowly from my mouth

into the dirt that covers us all.

i am done with the dust. i am done.”

Black History Month

Joey aka “Pepe Batbon” Connolly is a retired educator who taught in the CNMI, NOLA, and LVNV. He is the Poet Laureate of Tinian and enjoys stargazing.

The father of Black History Month is Carter G. Woodson, who was born in 1875 in Virginia to formerly enslaved parents. After graduating from college he became a school supervisor in the Philippines. He became the second Black American, after W.E.B. Du Bois, to obtain a Ph.D. from Harvard University. He died in 1950.

The first Black American poet focused on is Gwendolyn Brooks born in 1917 and died in 2000. She was a Pulitzer Prize winner and poet laureate of Illinois. Her poem here is the subject of a recent 2022 film, Till. She wrote the poem in 1960.

Emmet Louis Till was an African American boy who was abducted, tortured, and lynched in Mississippi in 1955 at the age of 14, after being accused of offending a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in her family’s grocery store.

The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmet Till

(after the murder, after the burial)

Emmet’s mother is a pretty-faced thing;

     the tint of pulled taffy

She sits in a red room,

    drinking black coffee.

She kisses her killed boy.

    And she is sorry.

Chaos in windy grays

    through the red prairie.

Black History Month

Joey aka “Pepe Batbon” Connolly is a retired educator who taught in the CNMI, NOLA, and LVNV. He is the Poet Laureate of Tinian and enjoys stargazing.