I have traveled much to go nowhere today
I have traveled much to go nowhere today
The full-blown body crushed out of breath
Vaporizes narrow streets of row homes
Boarded up, ransacked, like factory assembly lines
Curfewed at the night watch
While the shiny high rises of the downtown renaissance
Light up
We are tainted by the board rooms of high caliber signatories
Streetwise swagger reads eyes as enemy or friend
And our voices spit out I cannot get out of this coffin
Blood pressure reacts to such toxic swallowings
They say the river that flows through town
is just a backwater. It has a name too, Patapsco,
It is a root, a source but it is just a river
It minds itself alone
Today is the last day in April
It is precious to have an egg for breakfast
Cracked of its weight
Creased in the holy rock face of air pockets
Heated by oil
It feeds everything alone
And finds the air as it evaporates
The weathering of unmatched windows
Is a blurred refuge
Outside it is dry weeds and gravel
As music inside goes silent to find the chord
That will give it a center, a place of jewels.
I felt great pain at the events in Baltimore in April 2015. It was the city that shaped me and my family for generations and lead me out into the world. That in itself is honorable and also a priviledge. However, it is also a tale of two cities: the one I grew up in and the one of a longtime creation of an underclass and in particular of African Americans who have lived in West and East Baltimore for generations from slavery to a free state to what is now apartheid. Not unlike Detroit, Baltimore has lost its industrial base and its sense of inclusiveness. When I was last in Baltimore, I walked and stayed in West Baltimore and that pain brought forth this poem steeped in the history of a place of shared roots. — Mary Jane Sullivan
The Colorado Independent‘s News-Stained Poetry Project features poems that are about the news, products of the news, responses to the news. “News stained” is meant as a badge of honor, a reference to the long tradition of the poet as witness. As Carolyn Forché wrote, politics can sometimes be seen as a “contaminant to serious literary work,” something to be avoided. But that way of thinking, she said, “gives the political realm too much and too little scope… It renders the personal too important and not important enough.” News developments, whether or not they are reported, shape our personal lives every day. We don’t often think in the moment about how that is happening and what it means. We should think more about it. Poets think about it. And we want to help encourage them to write more about it.
Please send submissions to tips@www.coloradoindependent.com, subject line “poem,” with a short bio and some mention of where and when the poem was written.
“Charles Dickens- A Tale of Two Cities-With Illustrations by H K Browne, 1859”
