| I'm A Fool To Love You | ||
| by Cornelius Eady | ||
Some folks will tell you the blues is a woman, Some type of supernatural creature. My mother would tell you, if she could, About her life with my father, A strange and sometimes cruel gentleman. She would tell you about the choices A young black woman faces. Is falling in with some man A deal with the devil In blue terms, the tongue we use When we don't want nuance To get in the way, When we need to talk straight. My mother chooses my father After choosing a man Who was, as we sing it, Of no account. This man made my father look good, That's how bad it was. He made my father seem like an island In the middle of a stormy sea, He made my father look like a rock. And is the blues the moment you realize You exist in a stacked deck, You look in a mirror at your young face, The face my sister carries, And you know it's the only leverage You've got. Does this create a hurt that whispers How you going to do? Is the blues the moment You shrug your shoulders And agree, a girl without money Is nothing, dust To be pushed around by any old breeze. Compared to this, My father seems, briefly, To be a fire escape. This is the way the blues works Its sorry wonders, Makes trouble look like A feather bed, Makes the wrong man's kisses A healing. | |
You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,
Skip out for beer during commercials,
Because the revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox
In 4 parts without commercial interruptions.
The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon
blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John
Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat
hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary.
The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be brought to you by the
Schaefer Award Theatre and will not star Natalie
Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia.
The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.
The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.
The revolution will not make you look five pounds
thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, Brother.
There will be no pictures of you and Willie May
pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run,
or trying to slide that color television into a stolen ambulance.
NBC will not be able predict the winner at 8:32
or report from 29 districts.
The revolution will not be televised.
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of Whitney Young being
run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process.
There will be no slow motion or still life of Roy
Wilkens strolling through Watts in a Red, Black and
Green liberation jumpsuit that he had been saving
For just the proper occasion.
Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville
Junction will no longer be so damned relevant, and
women will not care if Dick finally gets down with
Jane on Search for Tomorrow because Black people
will be in the street looking for a brighter day.
The revolution will not be televised.
There will be no highlights on the eleven o'clock
news and no pictures of hairy armed women
liberationists and Jackie Onassis blowing her nose.
The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb,
Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom
Jones, Johnny Cash, Englebert Humperdink, or the Rare Earth.
The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be right back after a message
bbout a white tornado, white lightning, or white people.
You will not have to worry about a dove in your
bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl.
The revolution will not go better with Coke.
The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath.
The revolution will put you in the driver's seat.
The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,
will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will be no re-run brothers;
The revolution will be live.
Yesterday afternoon, Mrs. Obama hosted a workshop for students from California to New York. Designed to educate and inspire talented young people, students will work with the evening’s performers. They also heard from the First Lady and Melody Barnes, the Director of Domestic Policy Council, who highlighedt a new study on the importance of arts education. See yesterday's live event which was posted on www.whitehouse.gov at 2:25 PM EDT. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVIOKLXK9uYwon’t you celebrate with meHer tone is almost timid and apologetic. Rather than ask us as readers to celebrate “the life” she’s made, the speaker asks us to celebrate “a kind of life” she’s shaped. That small qualification (“a kind”) suggests the differences the speaker sees between the lives of others and her own emerging self-consciousness, and offers a glimpse into the poem’s real concern: the process of developing self-awareness.
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
By the rivers of Babylon we sat and weptUnlike the ancient Israelites exiled to Babylon, Clifton’s speaker was “born in babylon,” with no memory of a homeland:
when we remembered Zion.
There on the poplars
we hung our harps,
for there our captors asked us for songs,
our tormentors demanded songs of joy;
they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
How can we sing the songs of the LORD
while in a foreign land?
born in babylonFor Clifton, to be “born in Babylon” is emblematic of the legacy of exile and difference she’s inherited. In the 1960s, when this poem was written, the struggles of the civil rights movement awakened a new sense of self-awareness for African Americans, generations of whom had experienced both an historical exile from Africa and a metaphorical exile from the so-called American Dream.
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it upUnlike Whitman, whose long lines allow him to stretch out and envision himself as part of the larger universe (declaiming “every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air”), Clifton sees her universe as contracting, not expanding. She’s almost earthbound, compressed “between / starshine and clay,” while becoming smaller (like her shortened lines), even down to the level of syntax. Clifton’s consistent use of the lowercase (a stylistic signature of all her poems) helps convey this sense of smallness. Without capital letters of any kind, it’s immediately clear that Clifton’s words and ideas aren’t bound by conventional rules. Her lowercase “i” is especially representative of a self-image whose confidence and independence are challenged. When she writes, “i made it up,” she’s speaking about her identity and her approach to writing.
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight(Here, Clifton nods again to Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” riffing off a passage in which Whitman calls attention to his self-reliance: “I went myself first to the headland, my own hands carried me / there.”) Clifton, literally and metaphorically here, takes her life into her own hands.
my other hand;
come celebrateThis variation on the poem’s opening changes the tone of the celebration. Unlike Psalm 137, whose darkly ironic ending is bittersweet (“O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, / happy is he who repays you / for what you have done to us— // he who seizes your infants / and dashes them against the rocks.”), Clifton’s poem presents the speaker’s survival in the face of mortal danger as a triumph to be celebrated.
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.
