Weathering Out with Rita Dove--Mercy, Mercy Me #4

Number 4 in Urban Ecology's Black History Month Series:

The word ecology is such a big word, encompassing what we refer to as the nature: wildlife, flora, fauna;  but also our towns and cities, the built environment, and the micro-climates of our bodies and spirit. Our bodies are eco-systems and for our forebears, even the ancestors shaped and inhabited what we know of as the natural world (still true for some of us today).

Rita Dove, U.S. Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995, native of Akron, Ohio, weaves all these elements together in her poem Weathering Out from her Pulitzer Prize winning book of poems, Thomas and Beulah.

Weathering Out

by Rita Dove

Akron brick streetscape

She liked mornings the best—Thomas gone
to look for work, her coffee flushed with milk,

outside autumn trees blowsy and dripping.
Past the seventh month she couldn’t see her feet

so she floated from room to room, houseshoes flapping,
navigating corners in wonder. When she leaned

against a doorjamb to yawn, she disappeared entirely.

Last week they had taken a bus at dawn
to the new airdock. The hangar slid open in segments

The BZB in Anacostia

and the zeppelin nosed forward in its silver envelope.
The men walked it out gingerly, like a poodle,

then tied it to a mast and went back inside.
Beulah felt just that large and placid, a lake;

she glistened from cocoa butter smoothed in
when Thomas returned every evening nearly

in tears. He’d lean an ear on her belly
and say: Little fellow’s really talking,

though to her it was more the pok-pok-pok
of a fingernail tapping a thick cream lampshade.

Sometimes during the night she woke and found him
asleep there and the child sleeping, too.

The coffee was good but too little. Outside
everything shivered in tinfoil—only the clover

between the cobblestones hung stubbornly on,
green as an afterthought . . .

Not Exactly Literary But Fun and Thought Provoking

This was sent to me by Toi:World Citizen at the blog Advocation. It is a "mock commercial for a Black Moses Barbie toy celebrating the legacy of Harriet Tubman is part of Pierre Bennu's larger series of paintings and films deconstructing and re-envisioning images of people of color in commercial and pop culture imagery.

Two more commercials for this hypothetical toy will be posted throughout Black History Month..."

Black Moses Barbie

The Negro Speaks of Life and Death

In one of his essays Howard Thurman, an eminent theologian, mystic and civil rights activist wrote the following:

In an essay included in a little book of meditations on Negro Spirituals published under the title Deep River, I located three major sources of raw materials over which the slave placed the alchemy of his desiring and aspiring: the world of nature, the stuff of experience and the Bible, the sacred book of the Christians who had enslaved him.

The Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death

Thurman suggested that death is an inescapable fact but what concentrates our attention is the manner of that dying.  Nature does not owe us a living, but when death comes at the hands of a human being.  Well that's another matter, especially when one's own humanity has been denied.

Consider this offering from Yusef Komunyakaa

Yellowjackets

Mossville Horse

When the plowblade struck
An old stump hiding under
The soil like a beggar’s
Rotten tooth, they swarmed up
& Mister Jackson left the plow
Wedged like a whaler’s harpoon.
The horse was midnight
Against dusk, tethered to somebody’s
Pocketwatch. He shivered, but not
The way women shook their heads
Before mirrors at the five
& dime—a deeper connection
To the low field’s evening star.
He stood there, in tracechains,
Lathered in froth, just
Stopped by a great, goofy
Calmness. He whinnied
Once, & then the whole
Beautiful, blue-black sky
Fell on his back.


from Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems, 1975-1999, Wesleyan Press, 2001

Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)

It's Black History Month (I'm sure you have noticed the annual surfeit of media programming about African-Americans).  In celebration, for the first time in Urban Ecology history, I will be offering words from writers, poets, and essayists of African descent on nature, gardening, and mercy mercy me, the ecology.

Jamaica Kincaid

For the first offering, and in recognition that many of us are enduring a particularly difficult winter, an excerpt from My Garden by Vermont gardener and Antigua-born novelist Jamaica Kincaid:

I was putting the garden to bed for the winter when, looking over the empty spaces that had not so long ago been full of flowers and vegetables, I was overcome with the memory of satisfaction and despair, two feelings not unfamiliar to any gardener.  Satisfaction was seeing the tips of the asparagus poke through the earth, coming all the way up, wonderfully whole, real and without blemish, just the way they should be really, from the trenches into which I had placed their roots.  Even after many years of gardening, I never believe a live plant will emerge from the seed I have put in the ground; I am surprised, as if it had never happened to me before, as if every time were the first time.

Jamaica Kincaid, My Garden, 1999 Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, NYC, NY

Black History Month, Langston's Birthday and Ground Hog Day

I'm taking a break from shoveling.  It snowed so much here yesterday (Boston) that I missed Langston Hughes' 109th birthday.  I had hoped to be in New York City at the Schomburg Center for the Langston Birthday Party but here are some pictures in case you missed it too.

That black dot is the composter!

At the beginning of this Black History Month we are up to our eyeballs in wet, heavy snow.  I am less concerned about whether that Pennsylvania ground hog sees its shadow and more worried about whether I will be able to find the compost pile after today's delivery of snow, ice, rain, ice, and snow.  The 2nd of February is significant because it falls halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox.  Besides Ground Hog Day, it is also known as Candlemas Day and St. Brigid's Day.  Regardless of what you call it, it means that pea planting time is only six weeks away (the Ides of March).  I will shovel off a patch of garden dirt, if I have to, so we can have at least a ceremonial cultivation of peas.  Soon after that there will be the need for fresh compost from our very own pile.  Even though it is snow covered and a bit frozen now, it thaws quickly once the days get longer and a bit warmer.  And then all the inhabitants -- the bacteria, earthworms, millipedes, nematodes, and my favorites, slugs and snails -- get busy turning our winter vegetable trimmings and waste into nutritious food for the garden beds.

So tomorrow I will go out and liberate the composter from it's snowy carapace, in belated celebration of our halfway march toward spring, telling it's hibernating inhabitants,


April Rain Song,  by Langston Hughes

Let the rain kiss you.
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops.
Let the rain sing you a lullaby.

The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk.
The rain makes running pools in the gutter.
The rain plays a little sleep-song on our roof at night—

And I love the rain.

Collected Poems, 1994, Estate of Langston Hughes, A. A. Knopf.