John Coltrane, the was Jazz musician whose art marked that incredible time, passed away on the morning of July 17th, 1967, on what is considered the last day of the Rebellion, or in more exact language, the last day of military occupation...Below is a piece i penned for him to capture the madness of how the horror of the Rebellion and the insensitivity of it all actually obscured his passing...even back then...One of my few 'Open Letter' poems...
An open letter
birthday mantra for John Coltrane!
“We marched on ahead
marched on ahead…
“breaking new ground,
making new sound…
“knocked some of us down,
we marched on ahead…”1
dear
sir,
my city was just beginning to smolder
from our flamed rage when that heavy, hesitant july 17th, ’672
sun rose, echoing our fury…
as the nat’l guard began rolling out
in their tanks, treading all over the flattened torso of our landscape reduced
to ashes and anger, we were still too wet with hot blood to recognize the added
weight on that morning sun’s red eyes of u quietly being called to take those
giant steps of ascension back to the ancestors…
we thought we were making everyone
respect us…
we thought we were setting the stage
for real change…
one thing, we at least knew that
down south, we were definitely gonna bury that backward kracker stacker of
white supremecy called ol’ jim crow for sure…
and upsouth, we were no longer going
to be willing target practice for wild roaming pigs, or singing cadavers for
bloodsucking landlords, or human lab rodents for racist natural and social
scientists who wanted to see how many rats, roaches, chewed chipped-lead and
garbage we cd take, and still make music…
we thought were restraining the arms
of the warmakers, and stopping their genocidal droppings of Vietnam…
we even thought that if we raized
enuf hell, and made enuf noise, that they just might leave us the fuck alone…
we were wrong…
we came up just a bit too short on
the amount of hell we needed to raize to make that happen…
cuz just as we thought we were gonna
get somewhere, the warmakers brought their pyromaniac dropping needs ‘home’ and
aimed them dead at us…
COINTELPRO, Operation Newkill,
Operation Shamrock, Operation KAOS, Operation Chesrob, and other covert actions
aimed at ‘newtering’ our dare to change the world ways…
they killed our foremost field
slaves, like Malcolm, even Martin, who hated violence more than anyone, and
then Fred, and even George. Him being already inside wasn’t enuf for them…
all the while they were bombing us
with a nerve-numbing white fire called heroin…
and then they jailed a bunch of our
boldest,… Geronimo, Dhoruba, Sundiata, Assata, to name a few…in grand spectacle
fashion, and then locked them down as far away from us as possible…
and then in genuine
‘sisyphus’-fashion, just like Amiri warned us, they rolled that gigantic,
acid-laced rock of reaction back down dead on our heads!...and scorched, in
steamroller fashion, the face and torso of the southern hemisphere with
assassinations, coups, proxy wars and impaling neocolonial arrangements, just
as it was seeking to rise from the ball and chain of colonialism…leaving more
people maimed, more people missing, more people hungry, more people sick, more
toxic pressure on the land…
and they said it all had to be done
in the name of democracy…
just as we were seeking to rise…
“…knocked some of
us down,
we
marched on ahead…”
and now, in this strangling new
world order arrangement, where facism wears its stalking, smiling, most false
neo-liberal face, where they now have a ‘contract with america’ on us, they
want us to think that it is all over, that they are in complete control, that
there is nothing we can do to change this or to resist…
but we do resist…
we will resist…
we must resist…
the tide of consciousness, of
resistance, of human dignity, is making a loooong, wide, slow, turn to the
left…
under each new sun, after each rain,
out of the shadows of each of the heaviest storms, on the sharp heels of each
hard wind, the tide of human consciousness is turning…
most people on this earth want whats
good…
most people on this earth want whats
fair…
most people on this earth still want
to see what ‘real’ democracy is like…
and no one wants to be sick, or
hungry, or homeless, or afraid, anywhere…
the arch of the universe is long, martin
said, but it bends towards justice…
and it is bending, sir…
it is bending…
and we hear yr voice echoing in the
air as it bends…spraying rainbows born in battered blood and the defiance of
love…as it bends around the mountains of time and cosmic distance and light, we
hear yr voice helping it bend, with yr god-certified leaping lisp,…apart of the
bend, traneing in…traneing in…traneing in…towards that destiny of love and
peace u gave yr life trying lyricize so we could all see…
so
I say here, sir, apologetic about what we couldn’t say on that blood wet
red hot day when u left, as we stood down tanks pointing at our throats and
bayonets at our eyes, we say very simply and very plainly, we love u, sir…we
love u…
and thank u for giving us all of u…
thank u…
thank u, sir, for giving us
everything u had…
everything…
1.Lyrics, or the ‘mantra,’ are based on the chorus
of Blue Train, a classic John Coltrane composition and album…
2.John Coltrane died on July
17th, 1967 on what is also considered the last day of the epic Newark
Rebellion, an uprising which inspired some 75 additional urban rebellions
throughout the country!…
©1996
all rights reserved
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