the bridge (part II) a poem

poem for carolyn
(“breakthrough” my mirror in time)


i fought for a long time

to have my selves

stand

together at once

and worried about my

honesty

when i exhibited

myself on a page

the “triteness of my dreams” began to worry me

my poems “fidgeted” daily


but i learned

that when i just let go

the walls between my

selves

blended

and formed

a continuum



and what I put on the page was

myself if only for that moment in time

and found that my poems (when i wrote them)

didn’t “fidget”

and the “triteness of my dreams”

was directly proportional

to the way i live my life

as I continue to get older and

wiser


and so

when I revisited your poem

this time

after 28 years

i know that all the visits before

at different slots in time

held different meanings and were

not

a priming for a big payoff


and were not

the makings of a mindless migration

of thought i imagined



but that i was

building a bridge

a bridge to an unknown dream

and i see the dream

getting closer

but i don’t recall

its origin

i only know that

when I finally see it


i will embrace it

and not

consider it trite—

because i did all the work

and it

wasn’t

easy labor

and I will tell everyone

that God is Good

because

i’ve witnessed a miracle

in my lifetime

incongruent ramblings

have become parallel lines

which have formed

the outer edges of my bridge



when i prayed for peace

God gave me peace

when i prayed for freedom

He made me free

i asked for wholeness

and became whole



i find this to be

the foundation

of my bridge’s

structure



so now I can write

“a poem’s poem poem on a poem

every most could dig”

and “sound like no one in this black

world

but me”



or

maybe

i just think i can

but that’s ok too



and your “lopsided crystal sweet moment”

i thought

i understood

so many times before

is

clear

and i know (this time)

that it is in play

and I will never again rewind

just

pay and play

forward



and though i don’t know

what manner of older lady

you turned out to be

i can still say

thank you

for being my mirror

in time



and when you get puffed up and then

sucked in by blackness in that kind of “love black orgy”

you did

until you are a deflated balloon

remember it is the nature of our existence

being black with a poetic

mind

because as sonia has said

we are

“black and thought to be without meaning”

-jaa



“poem for carolyn (rodgers)” is a poem based on her poem from the 1960’s, “breakthrough.” I was 20 when I first read this poem in a black literature class. It struck me because I read it through the eyes of psychosis and I thought she had been through the same, even though I didn’t know I was ill at the time.

I “revisited” her poem ever so often and wrote my poem 28 years after the first reading. It is still valid for me to compare myself to, although this time in reality. I just turned 50 on October 16, 2011.

I had the privilege of meeting Sonia Sanchez (who is one of the reasons I am a poet, Carolyn Rodgers is another and I told her this)  at a book signing this year. She told me Carolyn Rodgers passed away in 2010.