A Homeboy’s Notes On Poetry: If Not Us, Who? If Not Now, When?

Young ones (or the young ones trying to move forward),

This pain you feel? (upon the loss of the right of black people to peacefully assemble, the Ferguson police department following the COINTELPRO playbook to the letter, children getting shot at with rubber bullets at night and having Don Lemon calling them thugs in the morning, and the realization that black people are going to have to deal with these kind of police/stand your ground shootings turned lynching bees for the rest of our days?) Respect it. It’s real. It means that you are alive.  Take care of yourselves.  Be good to your loved ones and family. Heal. Then when you are ready, take it to the library.

You knew this wasn’t going to be easy. You knew that we were going to struggle to the day we die. You just didn’t know the scale and level. And that’s ok. But we have to work now. We have to-through our art-give our people the same tools to make it in the world that are eldest ancestors had; and to do that we have to work harder than we’ve ever done. All of us. Myself included.

Our masters were not perfect, but in their better angels, they understood that their work was in service to something greater than themselves, that their particular abilities to make people see helped people survive. It is why poetry columns and sections had such prevalent spaces in black newspapers, and why poetics were discussed as much as music, sports, and politics. Throughout our history, black audiences (and conscious ally readers) knew that their achievements stood out in the natural word, were changing the language, and were integral in making their today a little better than yesterday.

If you are going to do this, poet, you cannot act like your community doesn’t deserve what our ancestors had right now. You cannot act like our people aren’t in enough pain to deserve a similar effort. You cannot conduct yourself like a people who are going up against a series of laws and statutes to give them second class schools, housing, and facilities don’t deserve your full commitment to our art. You cannot pretend that a people who have had sicked on them stand your ground, stop and frisk, and these brutal lynching bees, don’t need your love this very moment.