USA

Black Boys Play the Classics

The most popular “act” in
Penn Station
is the three black kids in ratty
sneakers & T-shirts playing
two violins and a cello --Brahms.
White men in business suits
have already dug into their pockets
as they pass and they toss in
a dollar or two without stopping.
Brown men in work-soiled khakis
stand with their mouths open,
arms crossed on their bellies
as if they themselves have always
wanted to attempt those bars.
One white boy, three, sits
cross-legged in front of his
idols --in ecstasy--
their slick, dark faces,
their thin, wiry arms,
who must begin to look
like angels!
Why does this trembling
pull us?
A:  Beneath the surface we are one.
B:  Amazing! I did not think that they could speak this tongue.

Brother

Jay’s mother is brown, mine is white-
looking, as I am, as is our father.
he says sometimes when he’d go
to fill the vending machines
with our father, the white bartenders
would say, “Is that your helper?”
my father would say, “No, he’s my
son.”  Jay says you can always tell
the person changes by something 
in the eyes, it may be small –
the eyes open wider or the brow
creases down.  He says that once, 
our father sent him to get something
from the truck.  When he came back,
the bartender had set him up
with a soda, “Have some pop,”
he said in a friendly way.  Another time,
when I was doing a reading in New Jersey,
Jay was with me.  “A yuppie place,”
he remembers.  After the applause
I thanked them and said, “I’d like to 
introduce my brother.”  When he stood
up, people were still looking around
for somebody, looking
right through him.  Finally, when they realized
he was it, he head a woman say, “Oh no!”
as if she had been hit in the solar plexus.
maybe that’s why he didn’t marry
somebody like us.  He married a girl
black as God – and brags to family, strangers,
to anyone about that
blackness – so easily recognized, his. 

For Black Women Who Are Afraid

A black woman comes up to me at break in the writing
workshop and reads me her poem, but she says she
can’t read it out loud because
there’s a woman in a car on her way
to work and her hair is blowing in the breeze
and, since her hair is blowing, the woman must be
white, and she shouldn’t write about a white woman
whose hair is blowing, because
maybe the black poets will think she wants to be
that woman and be mad at her and say she hates herself, 
and maybe they won’t let her explain
that she grew up in a white neighborhood
and it’s not her fault, it’s just what she sees.
But she has to be so careful.  I tell her to write 
the poem about being afraid to write, 
and we stand for a long time like that,
respecting each other’s silence.

Invisible Dreams

                    La poesie vit d’insomnie perpetuelle
                                                     --Rene Char

There’s a sickness in me.  During
the night I wake up & it’s brought

a stain into my mouth, as if
an ocean has risen & left back

a stink on the rocks of my teeth.
I stink.  My mouth is ugly, human

stink.  A color like rust 
is in me.  I can’t get rid of it.

It rises after I
brush my teeth, a taste

like iron.  In the
night, left like a dream,

a caustic light
washing over the insides of me.

•

What to do with my arms?  They
coil out of my body

like snakes.
They branch & spit.

I want to shake myself
until they fall like withered

roots; until 
they bend the right way –

until I fit in them,
or they in me.

I have to lay them down as
carefully as an old wedding dress,

I have to fold them
like the arms of someone dead.

The house is quiet; all 
night I struggle.  All

because of my arms,
which have no peace!

•

I’m a martyr, a girl who’s been dead
two thousand years.  I turn

on my left side, like one comfortable
after a long, hard death.

The angels look down
tenderly.  “She’s sleeping,” they say

& pass me by.  But
all night I am passing

in & out of my body
on my naked feet.

•

I’m awake when I’m sleeping & I’m 
sleeping when I’m awake, & no one

knows, not even me, for my eyes
are closed to myself.

I think I am thinking I see
a man beside me, & he thinks

in his sleep that I’m awake
writing.  I hear a pen scratch

a paper.  There is some idea
I think is clever:  I want to 

capture myself in a book.

•

 I have to make a
place for my body in

my body.  I’m like a 
dog pawing a blanket

on the floor.  I have to
turn & twist myself

like a rag until I
can smell myself in myself.

I’m sweating; the water is
pouring out of me

like silver.  I put my head
in the crook of my arm

like a brillant moon.

•

The bones of my left foot
Are too heavy on the bones

of my right.  They 
lie still for a little while,

sleeping, but soon they
bruise each other like

angry twins.  Then
the bones of my right foot

command the bones of my left
to climb down

Workshop on Racism

Her mother is crying
because Briana came home from school screaming in agony.
Two girls in her class are named Briana
and the children distinguish them
by calling her “The Black Briana,” taunting her.
she screams at her mother, “I don’t want to be
‘The Black Briana!’”
her mother weeps, helplessly.  “What can I do?
I give her dolls, read her
black history.  How can I protect her?”
Already at five the children understand,
“black” is not a color, it is a 
blazing skin.

© All Copyright, Toi Derricotte.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.