Donald Woods
Don Reid
Roy Gonsalves
Rory Buchanan
David Frechette
Craig Harris
Alan Williams and Assotto Saint and so many more were still here
How their black hair began to sprout twists and knots go wild and kinky
to signify early Black gay consciousness
I think about when I first met Donald Woods outside of a bookstore
in the West Village called A Different Light and we fell in love
We were all so young Black awkward and gangly but fierce and determined.
Donald was Audre Lorde’s student at Hunter
For all of us Black gay and lesbians struggling to find our way
Lorde was our guru
I think about poetry readings that happened all the time at
the Community Center on 13th Street
We were upstairs while ACT UP met downstairs
There were Black gay and bisexual poets Storme Webber
Cheryl Clarke
Jewelle Gomez
Sapphire
As Black gay people we couldn’t afford to get arrested so we wrote
performed and sang revolution
Like the salons of the Harlem Renaissance
featuring Zora’s Neal Hurston and Langston Hughes
These meetings informed me forever
I also saw plague and cancer decimate my people
People I imagined growing old with artists who knew at that time
they only had moments and seconds to live so they wrote
It was right after his diagnosis I saw Assotto Saint
performing on top of the tables at The Gay and Lesbian Community Center
I will never forget when he stormed the pulpit at Donald Woods’ funeral
I learned what it was like to make work with urgency as Audre said
as though your life depended upon it
to know you couldn’t waste a moment or a second
I learned more about being an artist in the early ’90s than any college education
ever taught me
It was from little boys with baby faces and death sentences who spoke
and forced themselves into the world at all odds I learned
From little and big boys and girls in the face of catastrophe
Raising their fists as Avram did last night
Uttering the mantra
Silence=Death.
FOR DONALD WOODS
On the warm spring day Rory Buchanan died his friend
a beautiful young Black gay man lay down on the ground
outside of the funeral home and let out a gut wrenching scream
He lay down on the ground, rolled back and forth as he cried.
He did what we all felt but didn’t have the courage to do
expressed in his actions battle fatigue, weariness
of a young community that had lost so many of its own
This might have been one month before we lost poet Donald Woods
and members of a Black lesbian and gay community poured into a packed church
hot humid with no outlet
Poet Assotto Saint stood more than 6' 5" in heels, but on that day
he wore a man’s suit and performed an act of exorcism and protest
when he assailed the pulpit took over said Donald Woods did not die
of heart failure, he died of AIDS and he was a proud Black gay man
If you agree with me stand up
And so today Whitney Houston is gone, Etta James, my idol,
the soul train man who shot himself Don Cornelius, Heavy D, Howard Tate, Michael Jackson, Prince, Muhammad Ali
Heath Ledger, Anna Nicole, Amy Winehouse
Nelson Mandela
so many who helped us know who we are and were
but today I don’t want any lavish displays of grief and protest
to do as they did in the Black church when spirit took hold
you could see a weighted 300-pound body fly up and dance
Today I want none of what happened with Rory or Donald
Today I want to breathe breath let go past pain grief
be the girl I was leap up sing dance not care
let my tongue turn blue eating an icy
walk down the street carrying a boom box
singing Stephanie Mills, “I Feel Good All Over”
to feel like I do when snow falls taking that first big gulp
of something new
the way I feel every time I board the plane to Africa or Europe
and I’m racing over images stalls upon stalls
filled with beauty and mystery
to feel with myself the way students express feeling with me
eyes open it affects everything
to feel the way I do walking up the hill to a new school
like a traveling preacher filled up with message
Today I want to release all the things I could
should have said
be the student who said I changed everything
even at home
my teachings made him grow up
become a new and better man.
HOLD TIGHT
On the Orlando shooting:
Let’s be clear, it wasn’t Isis or Islam
that licensed that man to walk into a gay bar
and massacre those white and gay POC
It was America with heinous gun laws that allow any white
or white-skinned man with mental health problems
to purchase weapons of war/machine guns with minimal background check
Meanwhile Black and Brown people can’t
walk through a neighborhood to buy candy, survive a routine traffic stop
without being murdered
No he wasn’t trained in hills of Afghanistan
didn’t learn bomb making techniques from the Taliban
It was here in America he learned apartheid policies
Separate and unequal
Separate schools
Separate bathrooms
Separate
Separate
Separate
that breed a rampant repressed homophobe
It was from demagogues like Trump
that purport building walls and keeping people
out and inciting fear fear fear
It was America and the Bush clan
that proved you could lie and kill and get away with it
that certain populations were disposable
I’ve seen these massacres before
it was when Black and Brown queers were dying rapidly of AIDS
only then the guns were indifference
Guns were in hands of every American
Guns were in hands of politicians
of doctors
in a system that hated queers
I’ve seen it before this killing
in the zig zag scars of women poets who died
of breast cancer
And institutions that still claim their legacy
Like many I’ve searched the hallways for justice
paced up and down
begged to be heard
asked for simple treatment
for simple problems
Gaslighted
Bankrupted
Run around
Only to find out in America
women’s wombs are big business
I’ve seen this killing before
It happens every day
reality shows
teaching us to step on and crush
each other to get ahead
A television that shows someone actually slicing
Khaddafi’s jugular
I’ve left so many places/communities
because of safety concerns
Sekou Sundiata died in the emergency room from a heart attack
Willie Ninja, that beautiful, beautiful dancer went blind
I could go on but my brother Essex Hemphill
is calling to me
telling me/us as he did in the crisis so long ago
telling us to wrap our arms around each other
and hold tight
Hold tight
Gently.
SURVIVOR
Contrary to
