Hoary Rock

It is the broken calabash that has iron staples driven into its edges; it is the cracked pot that has its neck tied with a rope. ~ Yoruba Proverb

He sits alone, lost and unloved,
Ramshackled eaves choked with dust,
A scrawny hen pecks in baked earth,
Just beyond a porch parched by African thirst.

He sits alone, with a chest full of clothes,
For children thirty-five years gone,
For a life full of woes;
He sits alone, as scratched vinyl moans, and
Looks out at the Zimbabwean corn.

He wrestles with primordial turf,
Wrenching from it, a meager living,
Which by contrast to the rest of the country
Is fit for a king for he is landed gentry.

Legal alien resident, in a nation of starving Africans,
Choctaw, African, Scottish American, ex-pat, Muslim.
Brown skinned, green eyed, bespeckled genius,
Envied for the passport that affords him the
Freedoms to spit upon his country of origin.

Politics and bedfellows, Mugabe and he,
Both products of American and British educations,
Each victims of self-hatred; conflicted and attracted
By the institutions and nations that shaped them,
Caught up in their idealism, they lost sight of the realism,
And became trapped in the solipsistic prison of nihilism.

My hoary rock, sits alone,
having garnered all that he sought.
Mugabe as a friend,
two old black men with the darkest of hearts.

Pontificate lofty objectives of sovereignty and freedom,
As if these witch doctors’ incantations,
Will liberate them from
The memories and voices of those
They do not see.

Barren shelves and salt crusted cups,
Mouths parched with dust,
the dampest relief from parsed tears,
Of those who mourn, the souls beaten, brutalized and crushed.
Their pain is mine, for I too starved,
for love he could not give.

Perhaps, it was his brother lynched,
One of twenty-three siblings,
Circa turn of the century;
Born of two mothers,
Rose Hill, Mississippi.

Perhaps, it was the cop who
Arrested him on black tarmac
Stretched between Ohioan pastures.
For driving too slow, too fast, or
Was it erratic?

It was the summer of 1969.
Older than the cop who called him “boy”,
He could not defend his young children
From the violence of that word.

Contrasted against a bucolic scene,
Of verdant green and doe eyed cows,
The battle lines were drawn,
Black piece against white power.

A Civil Rights chessboard of an ideological battle,
Each side fighting for the soul of America,
While here at the basest level,
Pawn against pawn unconsciously maneuver.

Black capitulates to spare his children,
The witness of a cold-blooded murder.

Handcuffed and led to the waiting vehicle,
Roughly shoved into a caged back seat,
A three-point turn later, the subjugation complete.
Face stony, jaws clenched, his woolen head
Did not dare a backward glance.

Waves of heat rose from soften pitch,
Eddied and waked as the black and white passed.
A mirage and tears, distorted hopefulness,
Of three children left in a sun-baked Plymouth.

This hoary rock holds fasts to his secrets.
Misdirected anger turned inward,
He became the tyrant and abuser,
Oppressed the family he could not protect,
Until finally in despair they fled,
From the untenable situation of a man,
Who lost himself on a sunny day in a distant past.

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