du bois in ghana by Evie Shockley

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend April 27, 2015   du bois in ghana   Evie Shockley

at 93, you determined to pick up and go— and stay gone. the job nkrumah called you to, to create, at last, your encyclopedia africana                (encompassing a continent chipped   like wood beneath an axe, a large enough diaspora to girdle the globe, and a mere four thousand years) was either well-deserved               sinecure or well-earned trust   that your health was as indestructible as your will. my mind wrestles with possible pictures: the victorian sensibility, the charcoal wool              formality of your coats and vests, the trim   of your beard as sharp as the crease of your collar—how would these du boisian essentials hold up to sub-saharan heat? would               your critical faculties wilt in accra’s   urban tropics as i’ve read that westerners’ are wont to do? dr. du bois, i presume you took the climate in stride, took to it,               looked out your library’s louvered windows   onto a land you needed neither to condemn nor conquer, and let the sun tell you what you already knew:               this was not a port to pass on.   your 95th birthday photo found you bathed in white cloth, cane still in hand, sharing a smile with a head of state who knew your worth—joy               that this nation’s birth occurred in time   for you to step out of a cold, cold storm into outstretched arms. would your pan- african dream have survived a dictatorial               nkrumah, an nkrumah in exile? you took   the prerogative of age and died without telling, without knowing. a half-century later, here in the country where you were born, i look               into a screen and watch as, near and far, a pan-   demic of violence and abuse staggers the planet. we seed the world with blood, grow bleeding, harvest death and the promise               of more. when i turn bitter, seeing no potential   for escape, i think of the outrages you saw—wars, lynchings, genocide, mccarthy, communism’s failure to rise above corrupting power               any better than capitalism had, the civil rights   movement’s endless struggle—and how you kept writing and walking, looking for what you knew was out there. your memory,               your tireless radiant energy, calls me   to my work, to my feet, insisting that somewhere on the earth, freedom is learning to walk, trying not to fall,               and, somewhere, laboring to be born.            Copyright © 2015 by Evie Shockley. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “For months, in late 2014 and early 2015, I had felt only able to write out of rage or despair. The black body count was mounting (as it had been before and continues to today) and no other emotions or motivations for creating seemed adequate to the enormity of the socially and legally sanctioned murders of black men and women taking place in the U.S. every week (or so it seemed).  Then I stumbled across the photograph of Du Bois I mention in the poem and started thinking about how he sustained his life-long commitment to the struggle against racism.” —Evie Shockley   Evie Shockley is the author of the new black (Wesleyan University Press, 2011).  She teaches at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and lives in Jersey City, New Jersey.   Photo credit: Stéphane Robolin Most Recent Book by Shockley   the new black (Wesleyan University Press, 2011) "Poem from the Russian" by Jean Valentine "P.O.P video: Evie Shockley" "Fury" by Tina Chang Read This Poem   For National Poetry Month, we’ve teamed up with 826 National to produce Read This Poem, a celebration of poets in cities with 826 chapters. Read this week’s featured poems by poets from Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038