Bones in the Soil
       

These empty landscapes; the entanglement
of trees, the river valley, the music of light
through mist; the silence — it is why I can't
make art; why I can't sit still in the dark
cave of a forest and think of anything
but spirts; well not even that but the bodies
of black people, so ordinary, so squalid,
so easilynbroken; the limbs, the ugliness
and indignity of nakedness, the disposable;
the dead end of abuse; they died here,
their flesh becoming the offence
of a stench, and then, soon, the earth
took them, and today a white man
can walk his family's acres, with easel
and canvas and brush and think: Silence,
the communion of trees, the confluence of rivers,
the chapel of light, the synod of forgetfulness.
I wish I could write myself out of such distractions.
Perhaps that is what Zen offers; you clear
your head, let oxygen enter your bones; and soon
you will see the amber of fall as only that:
leaves turning. But me, I think bones,
I think bones restless in the dark soil.

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Copyright © 2018 Kwame Dawes All rights reserved
from The Mighty Stream: Poems in celebration of Martin Luther King
Bloodaxe Books
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission