when Black poets congregate

Michael Varga

September 20, 1984

I.

When Black poets congregate
I try to hide the gift
Pocketed out of Africa.

Like a heavy phallus,
Smooth and used to pounding
But from a woman’s hands,
From fingers flexed in seeds tossing,
From palms wavered steadying gourds
Ladled at a mountain’s foot,
From wrists thickened by a bull-wrestling,
Yes, from a tribal-scarred woman’s hands
Does this pestle now rest with me.

How many mortars of millet did it pound?
Up and down
Up and down
Sounding to the breaths
Up and down
Of the ancestors left
Up and down
Tugging within her breast
Up and down
Guiding the suckling
Up and down
Of the tribe’s newest
Up and down
Up and DONE:

A powdered finesse
A rhythmic whole born
Of all that was pieced uneven

So many come together
Through the motion of a pestle
And so much comes apart.

II.

When Black poets congregate
I try to hide the gift
Sifted out of Africa.

As verses wind and turn
Spilling blood as they pound,
Resound to a rage,
Splitting rhythms into beats,
Building to a tremor, rising to a call,
To appall the guilty;
The pestle hints
Of some other blackness
Of a nurturing
Whose rage is wordless
Beating out time
To the breaths of ancestors
Left within the sprouting cornrows
Left within the waters’ foam
Left within the breathless bull’s horn.

The pestle seems out of place,
A token of a face tribal-scarred
Whose wordless song
Is meted out
In the up and down,
In the pounding
In the grinding out
Of the millet in a mortar.

III.

When Black poets congregate
I try to hide the gift
Spirited out of Africa,
Loading my head with a beat
I’m not supposed to fret.

Maybe a gift better
Refused? Maybe a face
Better uneyed? Maybe a
Tool better unused? Maybe
A better …, a better thing not

For this pestle,
Smooth and used to pounding,
Wears my whiteness mightily
Till the skin peels and drops
Revealing a beat in the pounding
A beat blown into me, sown
By a tribal gust I must feel
Or deny what’s carried in me.