Uplift + Elevate: Poems by Kwame Dawes

This September, Uplift + Elevate features the work of poet Kwame Dawes and painter Kat Wiese in conversation. Printed on the Union gallery windows is an excerpt of Dawes' poem "IT IS NOT AS IF." Below, is a recording a Dawes reading the poem in full (full text at bottom), along with two other poems, presented in response to the work of Kat Wiese.

SO WITHERED AND WILD

In my head, “what are these so withered, so withered…?”
Have stolen words from my prison guard—they kidnapped me,

left the door wide open, but I fell asleep, afraid to try to find
my way home in the dark, then at dawn, the light through

the trees fell on my body, making patterns on my skin,
and someone—perhaps an angel or a matchmaker said,

“Why you look lovely in this light.” There were plants
all around. How curious it is that you do not see the confines

of your prison at night. Here at dawn, the quality of light,
and the scent of blooming flowers, holds me. I will not leave.

I tell myself that the matchmaker is sitting in the corner
waiting for me to say yes, and I have not said yes,

and the words keep coming, “what is new on the Rialto?”
I am stealing, and writing those words on the skin of kites,

and letting them fly out into the sky—this is how I will be free
of the monstrosity of my imprisonment, I know how my captors

can lie. This is what keeps me up at night: the fear of rupture.
I am sleeping well these days. The contagion builds walls

around me. I arrive at the commentary—a kind of note
to ground all news, in half sleep, in the dark sweetness

of half-dreaming. The President we will vote for
is an old white man, and though we know he was once young,

we can tell that he is careful in how he steps, and will not jog
up the stairs—we imagine the voice of a black woman

singing gospel as the cliche of our salvation. The matchmaker
says, why did you call me here when you are already

married? And you say, because I want you to reverse
engineer my love—so that I can return to my first love

as one who was told by the village and by the astrologers
that this is your destiny—as if the language of love

is like the inevitable force of a prison, how we come to find
our cage a comfort. In my head, “What are these

so withered and wild…” My kidnappers are still asking me,
how much should we charge, how much will they be willing

to pay? The kite snaps on the wire and I cannot stop
watching it turn in the sky.

TEARS
After Kat Wiese

1.

You will know by the angle of her body, the way
her face opens to you, the way she builds a wall of noise
in her eyes, that she has studied the ancient art
of the damp-eyed assurance—her body trembles,
her cheeks grow sharp as adze, but understand
that she understands the value of her tears, She understands
how they are formed, what distillation of chemicals
must happen in her body, to build the pool of amazement
in this liquor, and she will not shed these for the fools,
she will not grace you with her weeping, instead,
if you witness a black woman’s tears, if you
spot the pooling of oil in her eyes, know that you
are in the presence of a power as grand as centuries
of making, and this is the way revolutions burn.

2.

Sister, forgive me for the tears I have watched
dry on your face. Pardon me for placing my cupped
hand under your eyes, for the tears I am collecting,
the soft oil, the saltiness, forgive me, sister,
for the imposition of my gesture, but I know now
how the tears of black women contain
the residue of power—how I must regret
their flow, and somehow cherish the grace
you have granted me to show me
the flow of your tears—the gift of their presence,
you have had to hold them deep inside you,
deep in your body against the battering of this world.

IT IS NOT AS IF

“Tell the children the truth…”
“Babylon System” by Bob Marley

It is not as if I have not been thinking this,
and it is not as if we have not been thinking this.
For what I mean when I will say whiteness, when I will say white
people, when I say the whites with such seeming assurance,
with such total confidence in the clarity of this locution,
as if we all know the etymology of this word’s genealogy,
the lie of a cluster of marauding nations, building kingdoms
by destroying kingdoms, we have heard this all before, O Babylon.
So, yes, when I say this, what I mean is Babylon, as the Rastas
have constructed the notion, in the way of generosity,
in the way of judgement, in the way of naming the enemy
of history for who he is, in the inadequate way of symbols,
in the way of the bible’s total disregard for history, and the prophet’s
dance in the fulcrum of history, leaping over time and place,
returning to the place where we began having learned
nothing and yet having learned everything language offers us.
It is not as if I have not been thinking this.
It is not as if we have not been thinking this.
And I want to rehearse Jefferson and the pragmatism
of cost, the wisdom of his loyalty to his family's wealth,
the seat of the landed aristocrats reinvented on the plains
of the New World, the coat of arms, the courtly ambitions,
the inventions, the art, the bottles of wine, the French tongue,
the legacy, the faux Roman, faux Greek pretention, the envy
of the nobility of native confederacies, their tongues of fire;
the land, the land, the land, and the property of black bodies,
so much to give up, and who bears the sacrifice, who pays
the cost for the preservation of a nation’s ambitions?
How he said no to freeing the bodies he said were indebted
to him for their every breath—the calculus of property;
oh, the rituals of flesh-mongering, the protection of white freedom.
It is not as if I have not been thinking this.
It is not as if we have not been thinking this,
And Bartolomé de las Casas, Bishop of Chiapas,
and his Memorial de Remedios para Las Indias,
the pragmatic use of Africans, the ones to carry the burden
of saving the Indians, to save the white man’s soul—
this little bishop of pragmatic calculation, correcting sins
with more sins. And the bodies of black slave women,
their wombs, studied, tested, reshaped, probed, pierced, tortured,
with the whispered promise: “It will help you, too, it really
will and you will be praised for teaching us how to save
the wombs of white women, for the cause, all for the cause;”
And Roosevelt and his unfinished revolution, O “dream deferred”,
O Langston, you tried to sing, how long, not long, how long,
so long! And Churchill’s rising rhetoric, saying that though cousin
Nazis may ritualize the ancient blood feuds by invading Britain,
her world-wide empire will rise up and pay the price for protecting
the kingdom, the realm, liberty, and so on and so forth. Everyone
so merciful, everyone so wounded with guilt and gratitude,
everyone so pragmatic. It is what I am saying, that I am saying
nothing new, and what I am singing is, Babylon yuh throne gone
down, gone down,/ Babylon yuh throne gone down.
It is not as if I have not been thinking this.
It is not as if we have not been thinking this.
For no one is blessed with blindness here,
No one is blessed with deafness here.
And this thing we see is lurking inside the soft
alarm of white people who know that they are watching
a slow magical act of erasure, and they know that this is how
terror manifests itself, quietly, reasonably, and with deadly
intent. They are letting black people die. They are letting
black people die in America. Hidden inside the maw
of these hearts, is the sharp pragmatism of the desperate,
the writers of the myth of survival of the fittest,
or the order of the universe, of Platonic logic, the cast system,
the war of the worlds. They are letting black people die.
It is not as if I have not been thinking this.
No, it is not as if we have not been thinking this.
And someone is saying, in that soft mid-western voice of calm,
“Well, there will be costs, and those are the costs
of our liberty.” Remember when the century turned,
and the prophets and pontificators declared that in fifty years,
the nation would be brown, and for a decade, the rogue people
sought to halt this with guns, with terror, with the shutting of borders?
Now this has arrived, a kind of gift. Let them die. The blacks,
the poor, the ones who multiply like flies, let them die, and soon
we will be lily white again. Do you think I am paranoid? I am.
It is not as if I have not been thinking this.
It is not as if we have not been thinking this.
And paranoia is how we’ve survived. So, we must march in the streets,
force the black people who are immigrant nurses, who are meat packers,
who are street cleaners, who are short-order cooks, who are
the dregs of society, who are black, who are black, who are black.
Let them die. Here in Nebraska, our governor would not release
the racial numbers. He says there is no need to cause strife,
this is not our problem, he says. We are better than this, he says.
It is not as if I have not been thinking this.
It is not as if we have not been thinking this.
And so in the silence, we do not know what the purgation is,
and here in this stumbling prose of mine, this blunt prose of mine,
is the thing I have not yet said, “They are trying to kill us,
they are trying to kill us, they are trying to kill us off.”
I sip my comfort. The dead prophet, his voice broken by cancer,
his psalm rises over the darkening plains, “Oh yeah, natty Congo”,
and then the sweetest act of pure resistance, “Spread out! Spread out!
Spread out!” We are more the sand on the seashore, so we will not
get jumpy, we won’t get bumpy, and we won’t walk away, “Spread out!”,
they sing in four-part harmony, spears out, Spread out! Spread out!
It is not as if I have not been thinking this,
and it is not as if we have not been thinking this.
It is how we survived and how we will continue to survive.
But don’t be fooled. These are the betrayals that are gathering
over the hills. Help me, I say, help me to see this as something else.
It is not as if I have not been thinking this.
See? It is not as if we have not all been thinking this.