Jericho Brown - The Tradition

The Tradition JERICHO BROWN Note to the Reader Copper Canyon Press encourages you to calibrate your settings by using the line of characters below, which optimizes the line length and character size: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Pellentesque euismod magna ac diam dignissim Please take the time to adjust the size of the text on your viewer so that the line of characters above appears on one line, if possible. When this text appears on one line on your device, the resulting settings will most accurately reproduce the layout of the text on the page and the line length intended by the author. Viewing the title at a higher than optimal text size or on a device too small to accommodate the lines in the text will cause the reading experience to be altered considerably; single lines of some poems will be displayed as multiple lines of text. If this occurs, the turn of the line will be marked with a shallow indent. Thank you.

We hope you enjoy these poems. This e-book edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. In memory of
Bertha Lee Lenoir
(19322018) I will bring you a whole person
and you will bring me a whole person
and we will have us twice as much
of love and everything. Mari Evans Contents THE TRADITION I Ganymede A man trades his son for horses. Thats the version I prefer.

I like The safety of it, no one at fault, Everyone rewarded. God gets The boy. The boy becomes Immortal. His father rides until Grief sounds as good as the gallop Of an animal born to carry those Who patrol our inherited Kingdom. When we look at myth This way, nobody bothers saying Rape. I mean, dont you want God To want you? Dont you dream Of someone with wings taking you Up? And when the master comes For our children, he smells Like the men who own stables In Heaven, that far terrain Between Promise and Apology.

No one has to convince us. The people of my country believe We cant be hurt if we can be bought. As a Human Being There is the happiness you have And the happiness you deserve. They sit apart from each other The way you and your mother Sat on opposite ends of the sofa After an ambulance came to take Your father away. Some good Doctor will stitch him up, and Soon an aunt will arrive to drive Your mother to the hospital Where she will settle next to him Forever, as promised. She holds The arm of her seat as if she could Fall, as if it is the only sturdy thing, And it is, since youve done what You always wanted, you fought Your father and won, marred him.

Hell have a scar he can see all Because of you. And your mother, The only woman you ever cried for, Must tend to it as a bride tends To her vows, forsaking all others No matter how sore the injury. No matter how sore the injury Has left you, you sit understanding Yourself as a human being finally Free now that nobodys got to love you. Flower Yellow bird. Yellow house. Little yellow Song Light in my Jaundiced mouth.

These yellow Teeth need Brushing, but You admire My yellow Smile. This Black boy Keeps singing. Tiny life. Yellow bile. The Microscopes Heavy and expensive, hard and black With bits of chrome, they looked Like baby cannons, the real children of war, and I Hated them for that, for what our teacher said They could do, and then I hated them For what they did when we gave up Stealing looks at one anothers bodies To press a left or right eye into the barrel and see Our actual selves taken down to a cell Then blown back up again, every atomic thing About a piece of my coiled hair on one slide Just as unimportant as anyone elses Growing in that science Class where I learned what little difference God saw if God saw me. It was the start of one fear, A puny one not much worth mentioning, Narrow as the pencil tucked behind my ear, lost When I reached for it To stab someone I secretly loved: a bigger boy Whod advance Through those tight, locker-lined corridors shoving Without saying Excuse me, more an insult than a battle.

No large loss. Not at all. Nothing necessary to study Or recall. No fighting in the hall On the way to an American history exam I almost passed. Redcoats. Red blood cells.

Red-bricked Education I rode the bus to get. I cant remember The exact date or Grade, but I know when I began ignoring slight alarms That move others to charge or retreat. Im a kind Of camouflage. I never let on when scared Of conflicts so old they seem to amount To nothing reallydust particles left behind Like the viral geography of an occupied territory, A region I imagine you imagine when you see A white woman walking with a speck like me. The Tradition Aster. Nasturtium.

Delphinium. We thought Fingers in dirt meant it was our dirt, learning Names in heat, in elements classical Philosophers said could change us. Stargazer. Foxglove. Summer seemed to bloom against the will Of the sun, which news reports claimed flamed hotter On this planet than when our dead fathers Wiped sweat from their necks. Cosmos.

Babys Breath. Men like me and my brothers filmed what we Planted for proof we existed before Too late, sped the video to see blossoms Brought in seconds, colors you expect in poems Where the world ends, everything cut down. John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown. Hero She never knew one of us from another, so my brothers and I grew up fighting Over our mothers mind Like sun-colored suitors in a Greek myth.

We were willing To do evil. We kept chocolate around our mouths. The last of her mothers lot, She cried at funerals, cried when she whipped me. She whipped me Daily. I am most interested in people who declare gratitude For their childhood beatings. None of them took what my mother gave, Waking us for school with sharp slaps to our bare thighs.

That side of the family is darker. I should be grateful. So I will be No one on Earth knows how many abortions happened Before a woman risked her freedom by giving that risk a name, By taking it to breast. I dont know why I am alive now That I still cannot impress the woman who whipped me Into being. I turned my mother into a grandmother. She thanks me By kissing my sons.

Gratitude is black Black as a hero returning from war to a country that banked on his death. Thank God. It cant get much darker than that. After Another Country Some dark of us dark, The ones like me, walk Around looking for A building or a bridge. We mumble and pull At our lips, convinced, Until we see how far Down the distance. We arrive to leave, Calling ourselves Cowards, but not you, Rufus.

You make it To the George Washington Bold as an officer of the law With the right to direct traffic When all the stoplights Are outand you leap Dirty against the whiteness Of the sky to your escape Through the whiteness Of the water. The Water Lilies They open in the day and close at night. They are good at appearances. They are white. I judge them, judge the study they make Of themselves, aspirational beings, fake If you ask me. If you ask me, Ill say no, Thank you, I dont need to watch what goes Only imagining itself seen, dont need To see them yawn their thin mouths and feed On light, absolute and unmoved.

They remind Me of black people who see the movie About slaves and exit saying how they would Have fought to whip Legree with his own whip And walked away from the plantation, Their eyes raised to the sun, without going blind. Foreday in the Morning My mother grew morning glories that spilled onto the walkway toward her porch Because she was a woman with land who showed as much by giving it color. She told me I could have whatever I worked for. That means she was an American. But shed say it was because she believed In God. I am ashamed of America And confounded by God.