The Tradition

by Jericho Brown

I will bring you a whole person and you will bring me a whole person and we will have us twice as much of love and everything. Mari Evans

Aster. Nasturtium. Delphinium. We thought Fingers in dirt meant it was our dirt, learning Names in heat, in elements classical Philosophers said could change us. Stargazer. Foxglove. Summer seemed to bloom against the will Of the sun, which news reports claimed flamed hotter On this planet than when our dead fathers Wiped sweat from their necks. Cosmos. Baby’s Breath. Men like me and my brothers filmed what we Planted for proof we existed before Too late, sped the video to see blossoms Brought in seconds, colors you expect in poems Where the world ends, everything cut down. John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown.

I am most interested in people who declare gratitude For their childhood beatings.

No one on Earth knows how many abortions happened Before a woman risked her freedom by giving that risk a name, By taking it to breast.

Gratitude is black— Black as a hero returning from war to a country that banked on his death. Thank God. It can’t get much darker than that.

My mother grew morning glories that spilled onto the walkway toward her porch Because she was a woman with land who showed as much by giving it color.

By the time the blooms Unfurl themselves for a few hours of light, the women who tend them Are already at work. Blue. I’ll never know who started the lie that we are lazy, But I’d love to wake that bastard up At foreday in the morning, toss him in a truck, and drive him under God Past every bus stop in America to see all those black folk Waiting to go work for whatever they want. A house? A boy To keep the lawn cut? Some color in the yard? My God, we leave things green.

I will not shoot myself In the head, and I will not shoot myself In the back, and I will not hang myself With a trashbag, and if I do, I promise you, I will not do it In a police car while handcuffed Or in the jail cell of a town I only know the name of Because I have to drive through it To get home. Yes, I may be at risk, But I promise you, I trust the maggots Who live beneath the floorboards Of my house to do what they must To any carcass more than I trust An officer of the law of the land To shut my eyes like a man Of God might, or to cover me with a sheet So clean my mother could have used it To tuck me in. When I kill me, I will Do it the same way most Americans do, I promise you: cigarette smoke Or a piece of meat on which I choke Or so broke I freeze In one of these winters we keep Calling worst. I promise if you hear Of me dead anywhere near A cop, then that cop killed me. He took Me from us and left my body, which is, No matter what we’ve been taught, Greater than the settlement A city can pay a mother to stop crying, And more beautiful than the new bullet Fished from the folds of my brain.

It’s not that I love them Every day. It’s that I love them anyway.

The blk mind Is a continuous mind. I am not a narrative Form, but dammit if I don’t tell a story.

I calmed my daughter when I could cradle My daughter; my son swaggers about her. He won’t have to heal a girl he won’t let free. They are so small. And I, still, am a young man. In him lives my black anger made red. They play. He is not yet incarcerated.