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Ravis
My brother turns his life insideout,
from a jail in Leesville,
from a half-way house in Lake Charles,
from a slave-quarter in DeRidder.
He is prisoner of his own rage,
trapped behind the swollen bars
of some lingering chains
and some sudden cage.
I speak to him from miles away,
from the cell next door and
lightyears away,
from motherlands and the fertile earth
our Mississippi father plowed:
I am trying to be the lawyer he needs,
the father who died fighting for his son,
the big brother with muscles in his miles,
the preacher with his pitiful prayers,
I am trying to give him
the key to the cage, the hammer
to break the chains, the plot
the escape, the magic, the ju-ju
the tunnel under the demon walls,
the North Star to follow,
I climb inside all his sins,
find them in the flesh of this poem,
do bloody battle with them,
rip them apart like a white man's curse,
become their bitter judge,
their merciful jury,
their solemn executioner,
I leave them on the open floor
of his cell, spread out like the pages
of a testament, shadowboxing him
like a mirror,
I can forgive them
those far-away long-ago sins,
but I can't erase them,
for they have their own afterlife,
their own ghost pulsating
on the hot breath where
my brother's frustrated bloodline boils…
yet no loving offering
from my elderly black hand
can reverse his youthful middle passage
as he sits
on the frontporch of his betrayed generation,
sent to his silent room
like a spoiled boychild,
where he conjures secret maps
for whatever freedoms
he chose to rock his dusty soul with.
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I remember Ahmos Zu-Bolton II as a charismatic and gifted poet. He occasionally took part in the Mass Transit readings in Washington DC's Dupont Circle in the early 1970s, which was when I met him. A poet, playwright, Vietnam War veteran, and tireless promoter of African-American writers, Zu-Bolton was born on 21 October 1935 in Mississippi and grew up in Louisiana. He founded Hoo-Doo, a magazine devoted to African-American activism and arts, and, with E. Ethelbert Miller, edited the 1975 anthology Synergy D.C. His poetry collections include A Niggered Amen (1975), Ain’t No Spring Chicken (1998), and 1946 (2002). He died at age 69 on 8 March 2005, at Howard University Medical Center in Washington, D.C. See Aldon Lynn Nielsen’s excellent post on Zu-Bolton; Doug Lang’s 2007 blog on Zu-Bolton offers links to more information, plus brief remembrances by Michael Lally and Beth Joselow; see also Grace Cavalieri’s perceptive essay on Zu-Bolton’s work in Beltway Poetry Quarterly.
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