Jamal Parker | Three Poems

Reading

Each time I’ve tried to write this

A tombstone began to crumble / my mother’s tears resurfaced

My brothers became babies / in a car crash again

I can’t shake these images / there’s an abrupt death awaiting me

And it appears to be beautiful / my coffin is as black as I am

 

Each time I’ve tried to write this

I hear my mother’s abuse / over and over

I see police invading my home / like an ongoing wake-up call

My mother’s abuser is handcuffed / I see my brother’s father

He is a spirit of unresolved rage / he’s been buried for 14 years

And I have dug through all the dirt / I try to make him human in my poems

 

Sometimes I think of my birthplace

And acknowledge it’s lingering death sentence

in Reading my feet become cautious of the soil

each step is another name ground to dust

 

***

 

Jacksonville

Jacksonville, Florida is where that boy hated himself

told his momma he was “colorblind” because he didn’t see race

and the next day a white called him “nigga”

 

that boy lived through Trayvon

that boy lived through Obama’s two elections

sat in classrooms as the complacent negro

saw white girls paint their nails the confederate flag

and didn’t move his mouth

 

that boy’s complacence fit all too well

behind an undead body

because he wasn’t murdered
yet

he wasn’t fit for execution,

the soul gifted to that sky

or the son departed to the Florida grass

with bones swallowed in the swamp

 

that boy was me.
I let that white kid call me “nigga”

 

***

 

Trumpets

In the Book of Joshua

the walls of Jericho fell

after the people marched

after the trumpets cracked the air

a god broke through heaven

dismantled the brick and stone of earth

and the people witnessed an empire collapse

crumble in the daylight

and i ask, may i carry a trumpet too

fiddle an instrument to summon a deity to break the chasms

whether it be white supremacy or the white house

i imagine a congregation of praise and worship

once the foundation of a racist country falls to its knees

chokes on threads of it’s flag

while a joyous song sprouts from our lungs

and we sing a new anthem amidst the rubble

instead of the deceased names of black children

when your country falls

we will rise to take the mantle

we’ll dance in this newfound utopia

our feet won’t draw blood in the fields

we’ve adapted to survive

against the leather whip

the switch of an oak tree

and the white fists that had the audacity

to crack a black skull open

this is the uprising the slavers feared

when they sought to lynch a body

they saw the ferocity that lives in black eyes

the pent-up rage that had the potential

to burn down their settlements and colonies

the age of the passive negro is over

don’t dare throw your melting pot in our faces

when the Flint water isn’t fit to drink

the truth is- you can try to kill us

but your walls are crumbling

and it will fall soon enough