Undefeated
(for Maya Angelou)
By David Mills
Sometimes a recipe’s got more hell than help in it.
But these ingredients came prepackaged:
three-year-old colored girl alone on a train,
Vaseline caked on her legs headed
for Stamps, Arkansas to live with Uncle
Willie and Grandma in the back of a store;
to wonder what’s so great about a Depression
in the hardscrabble South: folks so poor
they ironed their clothes with hot rocks.
No way to butter the bread in this lecture,
when no good deed goes unpunished.
Your grandmother dribbled in enough dough
to sometimes spot white folks; you, little
Maya Angelou, snuck so many Mounds,
Milky Ways and M&Ms from her store,
two of your teeth crumbled to the gums.
So she took you cross the tracks (in a town
where coloreds could only order chocolate
malteds: place was so prejudice even vanilla
shakes was segregated) then round back
to a dentist who still hadn’t settled his tab;
yet he refused to put out the pain in your brown
mouth. (Hate can melt in the mind and in the hands.)
Junior high graduation, second
in your class, could recite dead
presidents in chronoalphabetalogical
order. But when commencement speaker
Donleavy only praised your folks dark,
varsity prowess, your life felt like a shallow
breath that white man had taken. You,
southern, colored girl, who’d gotten lost
in literature: black letters/white sheets,
(miscegenation on paper); you, obliterating
time and color lines, falling for white guys
named Dickens and Kipling. But that day
you felt the sting of separate but evil
and made up a Negro soliloquy: to be
or not to be bootblacks, domestics,
farmhands and janitors. Only white kids
got to be Einsteins, Joan of Arcs, Beethovens
and Amelias—that woman with air in her heart.
Yet no more than a week later, you commence
to strutting like rockets was blasting off
in your calves, talking like Shakespeare
was leasing space between your lips.
undefeated
History was a clenched fist, as you
listened in, with Two Gun, Just Black
and Tight Coat, to that hi-fi Zenith
(small, walnut cathedral tuned to KDayKJ)
as Joe Louis fought Primo Carnera:
a bout between two races not two men.
When the announcer yelled Joe was buckling
under a rain of blows, the Brown Bomber
became a brown bummer; the odds
suddenly stacked against all your people
fighting for their lives in a thing called a ring.
The fix had to be in, ‘cause who’s ever heard
of a circle with four corners? If Joe kissed that canvas,
it would reverberate as far as Get-Back Black,
Mississippi; Crystal Clear yet Somehow Colored’s
Water, Georgia; Stand your Ground and Know
your Place, Florida. Be like Nigras getting
whipped in triplicate. Joe pinned against
the ropes felt like your people at the end
of someone else’s rope—tied to a magnolia
tree. Somehow the Brown Bomber battled
back: lefts, rights, jabs, uppercut. Carnera
down for the count! Cheers flood grandma’s
store; Two Gun and Tight Coat downing
spruced-up moonshine from soda-pop bottles.
Your people’s heads held high once more.
“The undisputed champion of the world!”/ Undefeated
You and Clinton had roots in the razorback state.
As a newly-elected president who “still believed
in a place called Hope” (could have been great and white)
he called upon you. But this was no prize fight, no
need for Joe’s ghost to prove which race was superior.
This was you, now six foot, barrel-bottom-voiced
black woman who knew a little girl from the segregated
South was still hiding inside her, a girl who used
to trip over the shadow of her shoelaces. Now
America and Arcansaw could see a Little Rock
in your heart at that inauguration. It was as if somebody
had licked the back of Stamps, that place
that shaped you (the one town in the U.S. that stamps
the word Stamps on stamps) Stuck postage on an envelope
and mailed your life—that victory over segregation,
Donleavy’s and dentists—across this land. Hell,
didn’t my lord deliver Daniel, first class? You taking
that morning’s pulse, reading your poem, your thumb
on the sky’s wrist (don’t get it Oliver Twisted sun
light never throbbed like this.)
undefeated
as a child your tongue cut class--
a truant who believed shutting up
was akin to shutting down. Back
then, talk was cheap. But now
silence ain’t never going on sale.
So lift every voice and sing cause
O me O May-a, I finally know
why the caged bird stings.
(for Maya Angelou)
By David Mills
Sometimes a recipe’s got more hell than help in it.
But these ingredients came prepackaged:
three-year-old colored girl alone on a train,
Vaseline caked on her legs headed
for Stamps, Arkansas to live with Uncle
Willie and Grandma in the back of a store;
to wonder what’s so great about a Depression
in the hardscrabble South: folks so poor
they ironed their clothes with hot rocks.
No way to butter the bread in this lecture,
when no good deed goes unpunished.
Your grandmother dribbled in enough dough
to sometimes spot white folks; you, little
Maya Angelou, snuck so many Mounds,
Milky Ways and M&Ms from her store,
two of your teeth crumbled to the gums.
So she took you cross the tracks (in a town
where coloreds could only order chocolate
malteds: place was so prejudice even vanilla
shakes was segregated) then round back
to a dentist who still hadn’t settled his tab;
yet he refused to put out the pain in your brown
mouth. (Hate can melt in the mind and in the hands.)
Junior high graduation, second
in your class, could recite dead
presidents in chronoalphabetalogical
order. But when commencement speaker
Donleavy only praised your folks dark,
varsity prowess, your life felt like a shallow
breath that white man had taken. You,
southern, colored girl, who’d gotten lost
in literature: black letters/white sheets,
(miscegenation on paper); you, obliterating
time and color lines, falling for white guys
named Dickens and Kipling. But that day
you felt the sting of separate but evil
and made up a Negro soliloquy: to be
or not to be bootblacks, domestics,
farmhands and janitors. Only white kids
got to be Einsteins, Joan of Arcs, Beethovens
and Amelias—that woman with air in her heart.
Yet no more than a week later, you commence
to strutting like rockets was blasting off
in your calves, talking like Shakespeare
was leasing space between your lips.
undefeated
History was a clenched fist, as you
listened in, with Two Gun, Just Black
and Tight Coat, to that hi-fi Zenith
(small, walnut cathedral tuned to KDayKJ)
as Joe Louis fought Primo Carnera:
a bout between two races not two men.
When the announcer yelled Joe was buckling
under a rain of blows, the Brown Bomber
became a brown bummer; the odds
suddenly stacked against all your people
fighting for their lives in a thing called a ring.
The fix had to be in, ‘cause who’s ever heard
of a circle with four corners? If Joe kissed that canvas,
it would reverberate as far as Get-Back Black,
Mississippi; Crystal Clear yet Somehow Colored’s
Water, Georgia; Stand your Ground and Know
your Place, Florida. Be like Nigras getting
whipped in triplicate. Joe pinned against
the ropes felt like your people at the end
of someone else’s rope—tied to a magnolia
tree. Somehow the Brown Bomber battled
back: lefts, rights, jabs, uppercut. Carnera
down for the count! Cheers flood grandma’s
store; Two Gun and Tight Coat downing
spruced-up moonshine from soda-pop bottles.
Your people’s heads held high once more.
“The undisputed champion of the world!”/ Undefeated
You and Clinton had roots in the razorback state.
As a newly-elected president who “still believed
in a place called Hope” (could have been great and white)
he called upon you. But this was no prize fight, no
need for Joe’s ghost to prove which race was superior.
This was you, now six foot, barrel-bottom-voiced
black woman who knew a little girl from the segregated
South was still hiding inside her, a girl who used
to trip over the shadow of her shoelaces. Now
America and Arcansaw could see a Little Rock
in your heart at that inauguration. It was as if somebody
had licked the back of Stamps, that place
that shaped you (the one town in the U.S. that stamps
the word Stamps on stamps) Stuck postage on an envelope
and mailed your life—that victory over segregation,
Donleavy’s and dentists—across this land. Hell,
didn’t my lord deliver Daniel, first class? You taking
that morning’s pulse, reading your poem, your thumb
on the sky’s wrist (don’t get it Oliver Twisted sun
light never throbbed like this.)
undefeated
as a child your tongue cut class--
a truant who believed shutting up
was akin to shutting down. Back
then, talk was cheap. But now
silence ain’t never going on sale.
So lift every voice and sing cause
O me O May-a, I finally know
why the caged bird stings.
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