Some tenets belong to night

Can't we hear ourselves?

Is there no echo, no caution pounding at our heart

barreling down the Halls of Time?

Have we inherited the mantle of immortality in vain?

Why feign deafness when hist'ry screams

and the ghosts of death wail from their graves?

Have we forgot as niggras lynched forgot

as so many peons crushed beneath notice forgot?

Have we forgot lies passed one generation to the next

like forgers repeating crimes the murderers forgot?

It's grace to go deaf, to fake blindness in the sun

to be on TV laughing when they hang the scum

then view their bodies urinating upon themselves.

What we bear is ign'rance passing each other in fear

the unmarked enemy snoring in our beds.

Our curtains hide, our shades reveal tales.

Our rural routes are hostels along which intellectuals flee.

Does it matter, then, the naming of our god

when the religion of the nation is the godness of the people?

Can't god be substance and yet bottom of the pit?

Some tenets belong to night alone

like sensible wars and spare revolutions.

*Reflections of Sydney Poitier:

  -A survival tactic that worked well for me was one I had gotten from my mother: "Charm them, son," she said, "into neutral."  Being charming bought me tine by allowing me to at least temporarily deflect the jabs of a threatening society.

You can see, within the context of how I lived and how I was beginning to work out a relationship between myself and the complex place,  that I wasn't free to indulge totally in delights.  There were delights; there were indulgences.  But I never lost sight of the fact that I had to cover my back, that I was always onstage.

Society had created laws to keep me at a distance, or out of sight altogether.  Learning to survive in that often-hostile world was trail-and-error, step-by-step; and just as when I was learning to pick fruit from the sapodilla trees, I often got stung.

"Oh, so that's how that works," I would realize.  So my closet is full of encounters and mistakes and tools and lessons learned truly the hard way.