A collaboration between Thom the World Poet and the Griot Poet
Sunday, August 30, 2020
TACTICS & STRATEGIES...
Saturday, August 29, 2020
For Chadwick Boseman...
(c) 29 August 2020, the Griot Poet
Chadwick Boseman, November 29, 1976 - August 28, 2020, Rest in Power
65-year anniversary
Of the March on Washington, 1963,
Eight years after the death of Emmitt Till,
Socially-distanced angst of blood still at the root and in the streets,
Whether Jacob Blake, Ahmaud Aubrey, Breonna Taylor, or George Floyd were "angels,"
They are still U.S. citizens and human beings.
Chadwick Boseman
Was a real-life superhero,
Publicly weeping over the eventual loss
Of young fans, Ian and Taylor, succumbing to
Their St. Jude struggle with cancer before his debut as their hero,
Not revealing his own challenges,
Fighting stage III colon cancer,
Eventually progressing to stage IV,
Making his skill at acting significant enough
For an Oscar awarded posthumously,
On the anniversary of "42,"
We are swooning at the news of Chadwick Boseman's loss at 43.
Counting the cost and pain of his numerous cancer therapies,
Of his character portrayals
Of our actual significant figures
Within the black community:
Jackie Robinson,
James Brown,
Thurgood Marshall,
T'Challa in "Black Panther,"
Was a fictional king
Of Utopian Wakanda,
Created in 1966 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby,
Post Blue Marvel, an African superhero
We all looked up to,
Wakanda is a utopia, a nowhere state
That had its own eccentricities,
Brian Coogler's interpretation
Made us sympathetic to Erik Kilmonger and his critique,
Because Wakanda was free and haughtily receded,
From middle passage and civil rights interceeding,
I waited 50 years to see it from page to on-screen,
I still have my "Straight out of Wakanda" tee,
The pride that like me,
The actor graduated from a historically black university:
Howard University Bison Pride is
As thick as Aggie Pride at A&T,
Friends from Nigeria and Ghana
Spoke of public celebrations on the mother continent.
T'Challa has two meanings:
"Brave king," and
"He who puts the knife where it belonged,"
According to Marvel canon,
He never took roles beneath him,
Stereotypical, or culturally demeaning.
We cannot fathom beyond disbelief.
What our next stage will be,
As we go through the pain of this grief,
We lost him on a significant date
As we get ready to defend our democracy,
The March on Washington, 1963,
Led to:
The Civil Rights Act, 1964,
The Voting Rights Act, 1965,
The Fair Housing Act, 1968,
1968: the year, Nixon and Lee Atwater
Coined the phrase "law and order"
The first backlash,
To all those acts,
And klan hood/choir robe to the "Southern Strategy,"
We will put this knife where it belongs,
Straighten our backs and stand strong,
Cast our votes to dethrone this dark thing,
For our country in your memory, noble king.
LEARNING...
A collaboration between Thom Woodruff, the World Poet, and the Griot Poet
YOU CAN ONLY DO ONE ZOOM @A TIME
Thursday, August 27, 2020
Black...
Image Source: Black Girls Nerds
© 27 August 2020, the Griot Poet
Jacob Blake was shot in his back,
Guilty of no criminal act,
A throwaway knife found conveniently,
In the driver’s side of his SUV,
Tried to quell a domestic disturbance
Between two women before he got hurt,
The officers who tased, then shot him grabbed his shirt, as if
They had never heard of handcuffs.
Shot in the back seven times
Point blank range, as if
His name was Luke Cage,
With preternatural strength and bulletproof skin,
Mutagenic properties that don’t exist.
WE ARE TIRED OF THIS!
Doc Rivers shed tears for this country,
Who’s shone no love for our faithfulness,
In every war and skirmish,
Since the Revolution and Crispus Attucks,
The Milwaukee Bucks embodies this,
Boycotting the NBA playoff games,
WNBA, Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer and the
National Hockey League did the same,
Because they know the agency of their own bodies,
“40 Million Dollar Slaves” * throwing off the shackles of
oligarch minstrelsy,
Addressing social inequities,
Despite - Jared Kushner - their salaries,
Showing 1968 Olympics Tommie Smith and John Carlos solidarity
(That by the way: need their Olympic Medals restored,
expeditiously),
Before 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse prowled
With a long rifle in the streets,
Kenosha has a history,
Invested in the misery,
Of keeping its 11.2% African American descendants,
Of the Great Migration Exodus,
In their caste system assigned places,
Rittenhouse passed police spaces
Unchallenged in any fashion before capture.
The needle has swung rapidly
From OJ Simpson, Michael Jordan back to Muhammad Ali,
Who saw through the Vietnam War’s depravity,
We are not superheroes, supervillains, or
Other fantastical beings,
But fathers, sons, brothers, nephews, cousins
Mothers, daughters, cousins, nieces,
In Breonna Taylor’s case, the possibility of procreation
shattered to pieces
In middle-of-the-night lead torrent birthed by
No-knock warrant,
Her Kentucky AG had more time
To speak at the RNC,
Than arrest the officers involved in this focused killing
spree,
We are headed for a Christchurch, New Zealand fiasco,
Worse than Synagogue assassinations and El Paso Walmart
machinations,
“Right-wing extremists were responsible for 2/3 terrorist
attacks in 2019,
“And 90% in 2020,”
August 26, 2020
The fourth anniversary of Colin Kaepernick kneeling,
Before Ahmaud Aubrey’s execution for jogging,
Breonna Taylor’s execution for sleeping,
George Floyd’s asphyxiation-by-cop on his neck kneeling,
Two days before the 57th anniversary of the March on
Washington,
Vladimir Putin has the American experiment reeling,
Pushing at fissures in the body politic to train wreck,
That’s long existed,
Reparations paid to former slave owners,
Their descendants owning professional plantation teams,
Playing in funded-by-taxpayers boondoggle schemes,
The descendants of slaves had to eat Jim Crow,
Segregation with hand-me-down books and missing pages,
Neighborhoods redlined into
Concentration camps
Also-known-as ghetto cages,
Where criminal activity is concentrated,
And summary executions could be committed
With impunity by state Gestapo before video evidence,
We’ve had that since Rodney King!
Before that, the newsreels of diverse young people
Hosed down, dog-bit and Billy-clubbed,
Hasn’t educated the ruling class of the United States to think
anything less than sadistic actions
By their “police union,” un-qualified immunity factions
Wouldn’t be efficacious,
Four more years of this madness will not “make us great.”
“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Lincoln said,
Nor bring back white picket fence Levittown’s,
And their “suburban housewives” barefoot and pregnant, or
Ward and June Cleaver
Raising Wally and “Leave it to Beaver,”
While border agents use microwave “death rays.”
On migrants, fleeing conditions generated
By moribund U.S. policies,
“Black” and “white” is a projection,
Of judged depravity, and mythologized perfection,
Like shit hole countries and niggers,
James Baldwin figured
You needed us to be this,
Your bullshit is officially dismissed,
The dark hole smoldering coals for what remains of your souls,
Count on the powerless,
The 1% figure
A caste system needs pariahs,
Fear must be cast on brown bodies of Melanin,
Hispanics/Latinos, Migrants, Muslims, added in the mix,
Masking the smash-and-grab crime-in-progress
By the aforementioned 1%,
“Trickledown” is bullshit,
David Stockton admitted it,
Just like “law and order” since 1968,
That doesn’t even benefit
Those who share the 1%’s hue, or tint,
These are fears they use to manipulate,
The rural proletariat,
“Hate of the other,” is a false aphrodisiac,
That makes no one richer, or moves one up in class,
That Putin gives as perfumed, rancid farts
While Orange Satan sniffs his putrid ass,
E Pluribus Unum,
Far from “greatness,”
Martin Luther King said:
“We will either live together as brothers or
perish together as fools.”
THINK!
*40 Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of
the Black Athlete,” William C. Rhoden