#lance jeffers

[binkloves]

[jshoulson]

Today’s Poem

When I Know the Power of My Black Hand --Lance Jeffers

I do not know the power of my hand, I do not know the power of my black hand.

I sit slumped in the conviction that I am powerless, tolerate ceilings that make me bend. My godly mind stoops, my ambition is crippled; I do not know the power of my hand.

I see my children stunted, my young men slaughtered, I do not know the mighty power of my hand.

I see the power of my life and death in another man’s hands and sometimes I shake my wooly head and wonder: Lord have mercy! What would it be like…to be free?

But when I know the mighty power of my black hand I will snatch my freedom from the tyrant’s mouth, know the first taste of freedom on my eager tongue, sing the miracle of freedom with all the force of my lungs, christen my black with exuberant creation, stand independent in the hall of nations, root submission and dependence from the soil of my soul and pitch the monument of slavery from my back when I know the mighty power of my hand!

[jshoulson]

Today’s Poem

The night rains hot tar into my throat --Lance Jeffers

The night rains hot tar into my throat, the taste is good to my heart’s tongue, into my heart the night pours down its moon like a yellow molten residue of dung: the night pours down the sea into my throat my heart drains off its blood in love and pain: the night pours a Negro song into my throat, bloodred is the color of this rain: like a bowstring of song across my throat, the wind through the pine-trees behind the shack, the loneliness i wear like a torn coat, the ghetto-terror kneeling thief-like on my back, the scream of a black man being burned alive, a black woman raped, blood trickling down her thigh, the anguish of her children, their anger to survive, the coal dust in their veins to come to fire before they die!

[afallowfield-blog]

O Africa, where I baked my bread     in the streets at 15 through     the San Francisco midnights . . . O Africa, whose SAN fRANCISCO SHOUTING-CHURCH     on Geary Street and Webster saw a candle     burning in the middle of my madness . . . O Africa, whose Fatha Hines and Teddy Wilson     I took to my piano . . . O Africa within every brown breast that's suckled me,     Africa's thousand calmings of my mother-hunger     across the North American continent . . . O Africa, within the black folk who've loved me     in this prelude to the sip-blood time . . . Africa, I lay my hand upon your swarthy belly--     and keep it there til death stub his toe     against my manhood in the night!

Lance Jeffers, "O Africa, where I baked my bread" in The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry, ed. Arnold Rampersad (Oxford University Press, 2006)

[sirsavantsmooth]

My Children

by Lance Jeffers What children can solve the equation of loveliness more quickly than these, the abundancies of good? How like a gifty moon that crosses its legs upon my porch is the laughter of these children at their father-clown! How unguent and leafy is their thought! I will give you whatever blackness you require; my flesh will be a breakfast for your need, for you will bring from your loins a race of saints: dark when they cleave the devil’s soul.