Classic and Contemporary Poetry
RUSH HOUR, by BRUCE A. JACOBS First Line: My honda drops Subject(s): Automobiles; Escapes; Family Life; Racism; Cars; Fugitives; Relatives; Racial Prejudice; Bigotry | ||||||||
My Honda drops steeply as severed sleep off the gummy lip of the highway, swims like a sidewinder up the stone-dust cut bank of the hill toward my house, a cinder block trapezoid just a shade less gray than the color of tonight's world. The car door closes behind me, an exit from time, it being a hundred thirty years since my next-door neighbors gave up their slaves. I am a black man stepping from a black car onto loose footing that feels familiar as darkness here, where farmers grow sweet white corn and I pay good rent for my peace and quiet -- although tonight the cicadas are out like God's power saw, some great unoiled ratchet, their on-and-off friction jaggedly endless, a wheel of steel fists making a hammer of even each instant's pocket of silence. I moved here for this: a quiet as trenchant as the thick wall of fluid around my brain that afternoon years ago when, at age 10, I knelt on the sidewalk of my father's drug store and clung to my task of picking up litter while three black boys kicked me in the head, drove their pointed shoes into my skull again and again, like slow-motion jackhammers or bullets on springs. I heard nothing, only the dull ring of space travel while they swung away, struck at my brain with their calls of Pussy, Rich Boy, White-Assed Punk, their boots pounding upside the head of a kid on his knees who had never fought for a thing that he owned. I held onto the pavement with my fingernails. Like a bettle who could scale concrete or walk out from beneath a car's tire, I waited them out, watched their thin legs recede. Then I rose with the trash. I moved here for this: a quiet as inviolable as wet cotton, like the airless childhood minutes I waited, buried beneath sheets after hearing my father's car pant into the driveway. Every night, I rehearsed the smooth motion: my hand gliding beneath the bed for the baseball bat, feeling how I would dive like a hawk if he were to loom over my mother with just one more threat about the men he imagined she traded for his women. I could almost see it: how he would hunt me, scouting the opposition, how the white light would burn his shape into my doorway, how I would square up, greet his tall glare with one whistling arc of my Louisville Slugger, send his skull rattling into the bleachers. I took to going to bed early, as bait, a decoy, like my favorite bass plug, jointed, wounded, barbed. I moved here for this: a quiet as clear as the hard gaps between blares of pickup-truck horns toward my windows at night, a quiet as sharp as the chink of lofted beer bottles against the brittle fence rails of this collapsing horse farm, a quiet as full-mouthed as a black boy eating mashed potatoes in junior high school the day a black upperclassman crook-walked to the table I shared with white friends, demanded, with irony, if I was a Soul Brother, let me stutter, "No," then pulled snot from his own nose, smeared it on my plate, told me softly, "Eat it" before easing away. I moved here for this: Air quiet and thick as a man's longest swallow. A thirty-year commute to five unmowed acres of every sound the night might pull from my throat if I were able to speak. Copyright © Bruce A. Jacobs. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...BLACK WOMAN by GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON FOREDOOM by GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON I MUST BECOME A MENACE TO MY ENEMIES by JUNE JORDAN A SONG FOR SOWETO by JUNE JORDAN ON THE LOSS OF ENERGY (AND OTHER THINGS) by JUNE JORDAN POEM ABOUT POLICE VIOLENCE by JUNE JORDAN DRAFT OF A RAP FOR WEN HO LEE by JUNE JORDAN THE NIGHT THAT LORCA COMES by BOB KAUFMAN THE MYSTIC RIVER by GALWAY KINNELL JEEP CHEROKEE by BRUCE A. JACOBS |
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