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How we doing?

Furious Flowers.

Y'all like, oh we too tired to clap.

We are going to go ahead and get our Black Universe IV reading started.

I'm so excited to have this final lineup of, I don't know, supernovas in our, in our Black poetry constellation.

I don't know.

I'm pushing that metaphor all the way y'all.

But, um, we are going to do the, do we have done it three times, so I think we know how it goes.

Our poets are going to introduce each other.

Uh, we are going to get our minds repeatedly blown and we will clap for it.

Like we, you know, let them know the love.

And, um, our first poet is Terrance Hayes.

All right, y'all, I heard you.

I didn't wanna with no socks.

Okay.

Uh, I, I got one thing really to read y'all that I've been working on for you.

But, with all this dear stuff, I feel like I should throw in my little, my deer poem from one of these books.

I think it's, can I say it's for Roger?

I'm gonna say it's for Roger.

Uh, How to Be Drawn is the book it was in.

The Deer.

Uh, I'm so glad to be here.

I knew I was gonna forget to do that.

Lauren, Joanne, I love y'all.

Y'all just make it home, you know, you'll make it home.

And as soon as I knew I was coming, I started thinking about this moment of what I would do for my family.

So that's what I've been working on.

But here, let's, let's do this deer thing first.

Outside Pataskala I saw the deer with a soft white belly, the deer with two eyes as blind as holes, I saw it leap from a bush beside the highway as if

a moment before it leapt it had been a bush beside the highway, and saw how if I wished it, I could be the deer, a creature bony as a branch in spring,

and when I closed my eyes, I found the scent of muscadine, the berry my mother plucked Sundays from the roadside

where fumes toughened its speckled skin and seeds slept, suspended in a mucus thick as the sleep of an embryo.

It is the ugliest berry along the road, but chewed it reminded me of speed, and I saw when I was the deer that I didn't have to be a deer,

I could become a machine with a woman inside it moving at a speed that leaves a stain on the breeze and on the muscadine's flesh, which is almost meat, the sweet

pulp a muscadine leaves when it's crushed in the teeth of a deer, or a mother for that matter or her child waiting with something like shame to be fed

a berry uglier than shame, though it is not like this for the deer, it is not shame because the deer is

not human, it is only almost human when it looks on the road and leaps covering at least thirty feet in a

blink, the deer I cannot be, the dumb deer, dumb and foolish enough to ignore anything that runs but is not alive,

a trafficking machine filled with a distracted mind and body deadly and durable enough to deconstruct

a deer when it leaps, I'm telling you, like someone being chased.

I remember, I remember a friend told me how, when he was eight or nine, a half-naked woman ran to the

car window crying her man was after her with a knife, but his mother locked the doors and sped away.

Someone tell him his mother was not a coward.

That's what he thinks.

Tell him it was because he and his little brother were in the car,

she would not let the troubled world inside.

It was no one's fault.

The mind separated from the body.

I could almost see the holes of her eyes, the white fuzz on her tongue, the raised buds soft as a bed of pink seeds, the

hole of a mouth stretched wide enough to hold a whole baby inside, I could almost see its eyes at the back of her throat,

I could definitely hear its cries.

Woo.

Alright, so let's see how this thing gonna work out here.

Uh, I just read for the rest of my time.

The two books came out last year and I have been, uh, you know, I try not to do stuff.

So I haven't sent this out.

I haven't shown it to anybody.

I, I've just been working on it.

And so it's, uh, I was telling Roger like half guzzles, so if you don't know what the guzzle is, I'm gonna say that

just means it's a caught between my brain and my heart, like caught in my throat.

If you do know what the guzzle is, it's like a half guzzle, which is like some of the rules, like the

refrain that comes through and which would be like I said to myself and then maybe said is bouncing around.

Don't worry about it.

Let's just see what happens.

Sometimes I say to myself, I said to myself, as my mother used to say in a way that made an echo of the things she said to herself and me.

Cynthia Ozick said a sentence is a kind of voice with its own suspense.

Its secret inner queries, its chance, idiosyncrasies, and soliloquy.

Gil Scott-Heron said, I am the closest thing I have to a voice of reason.

I said to the doctor, I am achy, gassy, forgetful, and I pee too much.

The doctor said, that's not illness, Terrance.

That's just aging.

If it ain't a disease, why is everybody trying to cure it?

I said to myself.

Webster said, epiphora was, exec was excessive watering of the eye and also plural for epistrophe, the

repetition of a word at the end of a successive clauses and sentences, Thelonious Monk figured it out.

The park was the first, at first name, Crystal Lake.

The guide said then for the local star, now after the company that hired the star, but I never got the name of the park because I said to myself,

the man who behaves as if he will become a statue in the park, dreams of becoming no more than a place.

The sign outside the bathroom said, wash your hand.

The sign inside the damn elevator said, out of order.

I said to my son, it is not only an imperative to wash your hands, but to exit public bathrooms without

touching any faucets or handles that may have been handled by those who did not wash their hands.

Somewhere Basquiat said, we decided the bullet must have been going very fast.

What concerns me is the enemy we face does not care about wrong or right.

They only care about winning or losing, I said to you.

When the Sufi said dance was the best way to speak with God, I decided to dance a little bit every day.

Thelonious Monk said, the genius is the one who is most himself.

Samuel Johnson said, a man of genius has seldom been ruined by himself.

Nietzsche said, talking about oneself is also a means of concealing oneself.

Defending Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara said, not the least function of poetry is to make vivid our sense of the meaning of words.

Sometimes her bling is backwards I think somebody said.

I want to turn Rothko's canvases on their side so his doorways become landscapes I said to myself.

I think knowing Mark Rothko killed himself colors how you see the paintings, I said to you.

There's just no way to know who in the room can actually sing before the singing starts

I said to myself.

Gil Scott-Heron said, no matter how far wrong you've gone, you can always turn around.

A bird flies in two directions at once.

I said to myself, toward the center and toward the border.

It's said, that it's said, Lucille Clifton was born with an extra finger, means something, I said to myself.

Every day, you are a prisoner trying to master time.

The signs in the park said, free healing, free fortune telling, free Palestine.

He said, the cops said to put my hands up after I was in handcuffs.

She said, the police said to put my hands up after I was in handcuffs.

They said the pig said to put my hands up after I was in handcuffs.

Tried and true strategies of fortitude for the self and family in the quadrants of emotional, spiritual, social, and creative life.

The name of Hamlet's dog, the Elizabethans' passions for lust.

My son is Paul Salon, my daughter of the flower of reason and mystery.

I said I would study their subjectivities myself.

A wounded heart can become infected if not allowed to heal.

My mother said the first grader's teacher said the class should call her dumb Dora for the rest of the year 'cause of something

She said.

She because of something she said, but she doesn't remember remember telling me because she said it to herself.

The people pushing along the sidewalk with no regard for others are terrible dancers, I said to myself.

She should have said the candidate's actual only campaign platform was white supremacy.

I said to you.

The power, power requires to sustain power is always trouble, I said to myself.

Peter Sellers said he had a violent aversion to the colors purple and green.

That's true.

Nina Simone said, birds flying high, you know how I feel.

And I said, I'm feeling.

Nina Simone said, sun in the sky, you know how I feel.

And I said, I'm feeling.

Use two ears,

I said to myself, because one must listen for both the perceived truth and the actual truth.

The perceived is for that which can seem for a period of time, a moment, a spell, a stretch, or so true, or the actual truth can take a time to tell to be true.

Go to the place you would like to be planted, carrying a shovel and a satchel, holding all the seeds of all the fruit you have eaten in your life,

I said to no one.

You will receive further instructions from the other side of the path after I've had my run in with the darkness.

A family can be torn apart in the dark, I said to myself.

Ginsberg said William Carlos Williams said, we have all sold ourselves out for heaven as if this earth was excrement shat down from the sky.

You can't embrace God, so you embrace yourself, you said without saying, God put you here to be witness, I said.

You know it's addiction because you can't understand why other people don't do it, I said to you.

You know other people don't do it, but you can't understand why they don't do it, I said to myself.

We grow learning to accept our parents, to accept ourselves,

I should have said to my son.

The black people who have video for family archives and those who have boxes of photos are luckier than the black people,

like my people who have almost nothing to show for our past, I said to myself.

On this day in history, my grandmother, who became a grandmother before 40 and has been single all of her 89 years,

having never lived alone until now, said again, it is glad to be alive.

The drive, it is good to be alive.

The driver said he'd been given a 9 1 1 vision on an island mountain, but he didn't understand it until after it happened.

Other people said the same thing, I said to myself.

An aneurysm of the heart, my brother said, describing a heart attack or break.

An aneurysm of the heart,

I said to myself.

When someone asked if I ever imagined a whole war set in motion by something like that, I said no.

But I said to myself, no, I had not considered the best path from the woods to the blood of the one or two cows

and horses in the field after their throats are cut for silence and measure.

I refuse to make a monster of myself creeping into the home of the enemy or villain, the loved ones uncloaked in Moonlight The sad, y'all are the

last one to live the most rotten and thus worthy of suffering the sadness one lives after that.

I did not imagine that.

The children complain.

They did not ask to be born into this terrible world, but that's true of every animal ever born.

Where a canary in a mine is a sign of trouble, a crow dragging another crow from the road, as I have witnessed, is a sign there is mercy in the world.

Where a crow in the bar is a sign, a door or window is open, or that the crow has followed you from the cemetery, a crow in the barn is a sign of nothing.

An owl in the barn is a sign ghosts are watching.

The sign say, stay back.

The sign said detour.

Everyone said they heard of the warnings.

James Joyce said, an object immensely regarded may be a gate to the access to the incorruptible eon of the gods.

One who has become all eyes does not see.

And as Martin said, Flannery O'Connor said, someone said, Flaubert said it takes at least three activated sensuous strokes to make an object real.

Where some students find The Artificial Nigger by Flannery O'Connor explores the irreducible non-linear transfusions of

confusion for white folks perpetually lost and colored people frozen, like lawn jockey's in New America.

Some students find its clear evidence of  Flannery O'Connor's racism because her title implies she can identify a real nigger.

A body that refuses to listen to itself quickly becomes trouble, I said to myself.

Gil Scott-Heron said, turn around, turn around, turn around.

You may come full circle and be new here again.

Power is like a drug that only fills you with the desire for the drug, I told you.

No one said those juvenile years, the adult inside the parent is disliked or even despised by the child.

The adult comes to understand what it means to be judged unworthy by someone you care for.

No one said those years are also the years you must come to terms with being the master.

The role of Lord and enforcer governing a self, both like and other than yourself.

The comedian said after neurosis said, a neurosis is when someone has a fear of no control, making them neurotic.

While a psychosis is when someone has an illusion of total control, making them psychotic.

I think optimism is a kind of psychosis.

The officer said, do you know how fast you were going along the interstate of my home state in South Carolina?

The people who stayed said after flames were thrown on their fields and the shacks in those fields and the bodies in the shacks, everything in the field

of flame became ash, which when muddled with rain and mud and time renewed the field and the scene of the crime,

I said to myself.

My son kept to himself the year he lived with me.

Everything inside him was burning until he was blushing, unwillingly, without speaking, expressing himself.

One of the Hughes' said the word tattooed wall to wall on the inside of the skull is horizon.

Every honest statement is the stay against entropy.

Each false statement accelerates our journey to the end of the world, I said to myself.

In that other life, I'm a celloist by day and a jazz bassist by night.

My satchel of bows like arrows and my instrument, like a giant wooden sculpture of a big mouth bass pivoting on a spear.

I survive to sing what I say to myself.

Where some do not grasp what's special in Nina Simone until suffering a little bit of living,

I did not until a thorough heartbreak fully appreciate Tammi Terrell.

Wisdom requires submission through that which is greater than power.

The guy said, Van Gogh, I'm gonna, we're almost here.

The guy said, van Gogh's mother, like the typical Dutch mother, was obsessed with clean cleaning and the purity of the soul.

If we can agree how inexplicable it is to be alive, can we agree how desperately, once simply wants to know what happens after death?

You know and I know something wholly otherworldly dwells at the periphery of everything.

Only you are afraid to call it anything less than religion, where I'm afraid to call it anything but something no one could name.

I want to show you what it's all about all over again, I said to you.

A heart that is partly turtle, partly tortoise, housed in an emerald shell.

A mind that is partly goldfish, partly shellfish, wrapped in water, wrapped in glass.

What didn't happen can still be true, I said to you.

She said she stole just a dollar to test the scale of retribution.

When Chomsky said, slavery is now regarded as reprehensible because the people in power have become more tolerant, I

said to myself, it's because the people in power realized the cost to keep enslaved and slave was unsustainable.

They were equally immoral motherfuckers who realized slavery was bad business.

I said to my son, pigeons are essentially rats with wings, which makes them worse than wax rats 'cause they're flying rats.

Once

they were a person who looked like you and me, and at various parts of the day thought the same things as us.

But after many fussy hustling, Sisyphean hours pushing and dragging, and being stoned by the big jagged

rocks of life became someone both like you and other than you and myself.

When the path turned to stones, I found the rock.

When the rock cracked open, I found an egg.

When the egg broke, I found a tiny emerald turtle.

When the turtle began to grow, I sharpened half the rock against a stone.

When I sharpened the rock, sparks splintered into flame when the flame was high and the turtle the size of an emerald helmet a crown with a sunroof,

I wrote myself.

Down with gravity, I tell the version of myself that heads to the bathroom to weep in the stall at the movies.

Brother, don't run, I said to the screen, if they're gonna shoot you anyway, make them look you in the face.

The sign said, caution.

Wet floor danger.

The sign said Free Palestine.

The sign suggested things people said were signs.

Someone said, I noticed all of the portraits of truly great writers the mouth is always closed.

Somewhere Rilke said, religion is art to those who have no creativity, God is the most ancient work of art.

Still, I hope in time we'll meet again, said Beverly Glenn-Copeland, who I thought for many years was a woman with the goatee and then briefly a man in transition.

And I now know to be an outer cart, an uncategorical musician.

Still in time, I hope we'll meet again.

The menu said it was chicken, but I'm telling you that ain't taste like no chicken.

You don't want to have to do it, you have to want to do it, I said to myself.

Frank Stanford said, Francis said both his hands were black as two boots worn in a Bible flood.

When he blacked out

he laughed like a cracked milk bottle, like the drowned black music kicking around in the mouth of a whale and river.

Like the three spells the midwife cast over the sleeping child, the teenage parents and the dog who does not speak but barks with tribal accent.

Someone said, why bother with mirrors in glass houses?

It's best to be a minor guard with eyes in the back of your head and eyeglasses popped as if trying to give your mind a view of heaven.

That's how Patricia always wear her glasses, I said to myself.

There are people who have said, I don't know what I would've done had it not been for this or that, but no one knows where

they'd be if they had not done what they did not do to get here or where they are.

Having exposed my hunger, I cover my plate after every meal as if it was a se, as if it was the scene of a crime, because

in my childhood, desiring food was a sign of neediness, I should have said to you.

The practice of drawing is self-actualization exercise, I said to myself, one sees something in the mind

and attempts to put a representation of that vision in the world.

My son said, I talked to him like a professor.

I'll be your father regardless of our bond, I said to my son.

You have seen where I'm from, I said to my son another time, boy, I will fuck you up.

I asked myself why I said it after that.

Nostalgia, Homer Simpson said, everything we loved about the past except for how it got us to the present.

Someone said things simply have the virtue of having never been done.

We are on a journey to find happiness inside and outside our families.

In the meantime, we pass the time making stuff, I said to my son.

I just don't want you to be anybody's slave I said to him.

You must learn to be your own mother and father,

I said to myself.

Um, thank you.

Alright, now

coming up next, someone, also someone who just always feels like family.

She just always feels like somebody I grew up with could have grown up with and maybe did grow up with.

And she was just, I don't know.

Evie Shockley, she knows all the words.

Come on, Evie.

Oh my gosh.

Okay.

That, that doesn't make it easier to follow him.

Terrance, thanks for that beautiful reading.

Um, thank you all.

Thank you, Lauren.

Thank you Joanne.

Um, poetry lovers.

Let's do this thing.

Um, I, I have a few things I wanna do.

I wanna, um, I was inspired by some of the readings over the course of these three days to, um, to share an elegy that I

wrote because I love the way that people's names are being brought into the room.

Uh, so that's where I'm gonna start.

How long has this Jayne been gone?

Not long.

Not long.

In fact, she's back flapping with the gale force laughter of the first kites of March.

Growling like a motorcycle of liberation.

Howling like the angel of field hollers at the bleachers of poetic apathy where they're always ready to make some noise, but never get in the game.

Oh, yes, she's back.

Back like she was never gone.

Still blues washing over the whitewashing of the music.

Still pinning the tail on the covert donkey of domination.

Still hissing wisdom into the imperial bath water.

Still cussing the fuck out of evil rapist punks and the friendly ones too.

She's right beneath your mama's left breast right up in the cook footed cornbread.

Still breaking out like sweat on the drummer's forehead.

Still chuckling in the backyard over her hot diasporas stew.

Can't you hear her?

Rumbling like an earthquake through the crowded blocks of watts.

Sizzling like the wind off the ancient coast of Ghana.

Honking like the traffic symphony and the hot sauce streets of New York.

Crashing onto the untamed sands of the people's beaches of Cuba.

How long has this Jane, this breath taking

Jayne Cortez been gone.

Not long.

Not long.

In fact, she's back.

Yeah.

Back for seconds.

A little more Armstrong Funk in the sunshine.

Another helping of that spicy cesarean callaloo with a bit of red pepper poet mixed in.

Another round of Big Mama Thornton blues brew, right bumblebee?

Yeah.

She's looking for a second slice of that wicked shit

Guillén cooked up.

Another bite of that African truth casserole Chano Pozo's serving from his conga.

Very fine.

Very fine.

One more taste of the scatology's fiddle Ella's still slinging around the Savoy Ballroom.

One more ride on V. Train this side of time before she takes it to her final destination.

Have you seen her?

Drinking the conjure woman's pot liquor straight out of the pot.

Sashaying across the evening sky like a bouquet of black girls' smiles.

Have you heard her?

Toxic in her gut, gut bucket lullabies into the ears of desperate children, exhausted men, and outraged women.

Sweeping the dust of corporate sponsored exploitation off the bandstand with her fire spitting lyrical jazz cleanup crew.

Have you felt her rattling your bones with the daily news of the latest pro-democracy drone strike?

Licking with sandpaper cat tongue kisses

the numbed shell of cultural desensitization to violence we call paying the bills?

Have you seen her?

Have you seen her?

How long, how long has our Jayne been gone?

Not long.

Not long.

She's no farther away than the sound of her name and her hellified poetry ringing out of our long memory throats.

If we act right, she'll be right back.

Wow.

That's just me trying to channel, uh, one of my champions, one of my heroes.

And if you don't know, please go find out.

Jayne Cortez.

Um, I'm gonna continue, um, calling out some of my sister artists and inspirations and, and, you know, companions on this journey.

Um, the amazing artist Alison Saar.

Um, yes.

Give it up for Alison.

Yes.

She designed, she sculpted this beautiful piece of work that, um, graces the cover of suddenly we.

And, um, she calls this sculpture, which she makes, you know, she works a lot with found materials, and you can kind

of imagine what she found by looking at this, um, but you might not be able to see what she named the sculpture from.

It's called the, the piece is called Bluebird.

My poem is called Perched.

I am Black.

Comely.

A girl on the cusp of desire.

My dangling toes take the rest, the rest of my body refuses.

Spine upright.

My pose proposes anticipation.

I poise in copper colored tension, intent on manifesting my soul in the discouraging world.

Under the rough eyes of others, I stiffen.

If I must be hard, it will be as a tree alive with change.

Inside me a love of beauty rises like sap sprouts from my scalp and stretches forth.

I send out my song an aria blue and feathered and grow toward it.

Choirs bear but soon to bud.

I am Black and becoming.

I don't think she's still here or maybe she is.

Um, this poem, this next poem has an epigraph.

From the Nikkiy Finney, the beloved Nikky Finney.

Um, and, uh, I am reading this poem, um, you know, as a representative of the childless cat ladies.

Nikky.

Oh, I'm here.

We're here.

Um, Nikky, I love this, this, this line.

She says, the things that I give birth to matter.

The things that I give birth to, give birth to other things.

The Blessings.

I gave mine away, not all, but the greater portion, some would say.

I gave away the ready claim to goodness, to purpose.

I gave away Mary, Sarah, and Isis.

I gave away necessity and invention.

I gave away a whole holiday, but I kept Billie.

I gave away the chance to try and fail to have it all.

I gave away the one thing that makes some men pay.

I gave away the pedestal.

The bouquet.

I gave away Nell Wright.

But I kept Sula Peace.

I gave away the fine tooth comb, but I kept the oyster knife.

I gave away the first word, the new mouth.

Uh, the new mouth forms.

The easiest to parlay across so many languages.

Escaping the maw, I gave away the power to hold and be held in sway, but I kept Cho Parton, Benny Chapman and Tomè.

I gave away the Eve who left the garden that day, but kept the cool green, shady, fruitless, fruitful stay.

The evening that did not fall away.

Um, I, I think I wanna go to one new piece.

This is, um, nerve wracking.

Um, where did it go?

Oh, here it is.

Okay.

Um, this piece, um, I get to do one more shout out to, um, a poet who, uh, means a lot to me.

And, um, I think the only thing I'm gonna try to say to, to prepare you for what you're going to hear is

just that, um, I think about language and there's this phrase, do people still say it in the nick of time?

Like, I was like, what the heck is the nick of time?

And then I started thinking about the word nick and the word time.

Um, and just the concept.

So here we go.

This poem is called, um, Time: The Nick and the epigraph is from Dionne Brand.

She says, what is in time?

Everything and nothing.

The ambulance, the apology, the wrinkle, the retrieval.

Catastrophe averted, is still carried in the bloodstream, constricted heart, arteries, cellfuls of what

of could-have-been collected and held out to pos, to community.

Posterity.

The chasing hounds, their toothy growling fury, even escaped, bites the imagination descended from danger, nips and holds

the skin of the then to the now, a bloody fold pinned by an ivory clip.

The nick of time, a mark borne and reborn, generation after generation, the time nicked, hours, days, years

spent holding the line against deaths designated, designed, waiting for us,

the nick marking the passage of the time of unfreedom on our bodies, passed down as the babies passed through the nick of time opening, bloody, between slick thighs.

The rebirth of hope, of will, children stapled by bomb shards to their people's past, some far-too-late future

branded as just in time, are nicked, unnicked into a world where they must steal back what belongs to them.

Everything and nothing, the arrival, the acknowledgement, the reparations, the return.

Um, I'm gonna just read two more.

This one, I'm going back to read an old one just because, um, it doesn't actually shout out Harryette Mullen, but you know, I'm gonna shout out Harryette Mullen.

So, um, I would call this the first poem I wrote under the influence of Harryette.

You know, she's a drug, she's addictive.

Um, this is called You Must Walk This Lonesome.

Say hello to moon leads you into trees as thick as folk on Easter pews.

Dark but ventured through amazing was blind but now fireflies, glittering, dangling from evergreens like Christmas oracles.

Soon you meet the river bank down by the riverside.

Water baptizes your feet.

Moon bursts back in low yellow swing low sweet chariot of cheese shines on in the river.

Cup hands and sip but never saw inside a peace be still.

Mix in your tears.

Moon distills distress like yours so nobody knows the trouble it causes.

Pull up a log and sit until your empty is full.

Your straight is wool.

Your death is yule.

Moonshine will do that.

Barter with you.

What you got for what you need.

Draw from the river like it is well with my soul.

Oh moon, you croon and home you go.

Um, and I'm gonna read one more and sit down.

Um, this poem is, uh, the final poem in Suddenly We.

It is a poem that I hope to not have to read someday.

Um, there's an epic, um, a dedication, you might say pour les deux mille plus Site-Mémorial du camp des Milles, um, which just means for the

2000 and more, um, who were held in the, the Site-Mémorial, the memorial site of the camp, uh, in Les Milles.

Les Milles is a city, a town in the south of France, and it also means the thousands.

Les Milles.

There is no poem unless, I, we can find the courage to speak.

In the middle of a vacation in the south of France, a chance to visit a World War II detention center

arises, dusty and bleak, just outside aix-en-provence, just past the scent of lavender, in an ancient heat.

The first thing you see and the last thing you visit is a boxcar.

You know what it means.

It takes the same toll on the breath, the pulse, as the rusted shackles displayed in another damned museum.

There are histories of torture preserved all around us.

Formally officially with placards and institutional funding.

Casually, quietly, unavoidably in the quality of a glance, the poverty of an existence, the demographics of a mall, a church, a prison.

In a former tile factory, we learn again how anything can be misused, how anyone can be abused.

A kiln is not a dormitory until it is.

There.

Here.

Slept people who were too Jewish to be German, too German to be French, too despised and feared to

be defended even by those who feared they, we, might soon be despised.

If I now say Palestine, have I forgotten Auschwitz?

If I say settlements, have I now forgotten camps?

If I don't say Palestine, have I forgotten Elmina, Selma, Cape Town, Haiti?

Must every place-name on earth be a shorthand for violence on a map of grief?

Orlando,

Charleston,

Wounded Knee,

Sharpeville,

Gettysburg, Tiananmen Square,

Gaza , Katyn, Plaza de Mayo, Soweto, Dominican Republic, Hiroshima, Srebrenica, Rwanda, Cambodia, Ankara, Adana, Odessa, Nanking.

Yesterday and yesterday's yesterday,

the planet pushing up sycamores and lavender, rice and plantains, fertilized with lead and blood,

with rain from poisonous clouds and the dust that becomes of the dead.

Adam, whose name means clay, was not baked in a kiln.

Eve's name means life, implies the day that follows.

Will tomorrow be a place we can name after something that grows?

What is the proper use of a wall?

There are so many histories buried in the space and silence around, within, these words.

These lines make a poor but portable museum, a set of sketches, palimpsests, faint and painfully incomplete that

map the territory of the human, with arrows pointing in every direction.

Some leading from you, some leading to you.

There is no poem unless you, we can find the courage to hear.

Thank you.

Love you poetry people.

Love you.

Love this next speaker, this next poet, this next artist, Niyi Osundare.

Yay.

Thank you very, very much.

Um,

about six o'clock this morning,

I was woken up by a call from Nigeria.

On the other side was my old teacher, 96 years young.

Taught me 1967, 68 when I was in high school.

Niyi how are you?

I haven't seen you for a long time.

I understand you are at so, so, so place and that so, so, so place is this.

With him was my younger brother, a professor.

Uh, and there were other people all around.

Um, the point I'm trying to make is,

this has been magical.

Simply magical.

My poetry has taken me to virtually all the continents in the world.

I must say outside continental Africa I have never had an audience like this.

It's, uh, it's amazing.