For My People

[Clifford Black]

For My People
by Margaret Walker
For my people everywhere singing their songs repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues and their jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an unseen power;
For my people lending their strength to the years, to the gone years and the now years and the maybe years, washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching dragging along never gaining never reaping never knowing and never understanding.
For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama backyards playing and baptizing and preaching and doctor and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking and playhouse and concert and store and hair and Miss Choomby and company;
For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn to know the reasons why and the answers to and the people who and the places where and the days when, in memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we were black and poor and small and different and nobody cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood.
For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to be Man and Woman, to laugh and dance and sing and play and drink their wine and religion and success, to marry their playmates and bear children and then die of consumption and anemia and lynching;
For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy people filling the cabarets and taverns and other people's pockets needing bread and shoes and milk and land and money and something—something all our own;
For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied and shackled and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;
For my people blundering and groping and floundering in the dark of churches and schools and clubs and societies, associations and councils and committees and conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches, preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by false prophet and holy believer.
For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding, trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people, all the face, all the adams and eves and their countless generations;
Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth; let a people loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing in our spirit and our blood. Let the martial songs be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now rise and take control.

[Clifford Black]

Let this note be a reminder to all of those who are doing "the work", before you lie, at the next meeting, learn this poem.

B.

[Clifford Black]

Namaska Adisa-

In answer to your question regarding disposition, I am holding up as well as can be expected. In response to ""How Long"", let us let jackal provide us with the response "Not Long", at lease that is what the monkey said when he got his tail cut off.

[Adisa]

The words of Margaret Walker, still ring true today.  Raven you speak truth about the first stanza.  What jumped off the page at me was "unseen power."  I have been told to believe in a god that would one day return and take all his children who have been suffering for long period of time.  I have been told that there is power in his name alone among a few other things I never really understood, but as Ms. Walker indicates this power is yet to be seen, particularly among people I am relative to.  That alone made me take a step back after one day noticing the same people making requests over and over and over week after week.  The question I asked my self was why was this necessary if all this power is available to his children.

The message I also recieved was how long can people continue to do the same thing over and over without any results, what is it going to take to finally decide to try something a different way that will be beneficial to you, your children and the future.  When is enough ever going to be enough.  How much additional time is going to be dedicated to what has proven not to work or proven useful and beneficial.  

 

 

 

[Clifford Black]

Namaska Reaven,

I appreciate you, and all, that you are Becoming!!!!!

[Raven Writes]

The first stanza alone is power packed. I had to look up dirges, ditties, and jubilees. You mention this poem in class rather frequenrly. I found it in one of my African Am lit anthologies and try to read it everyday. She tells the tale of how so many different kindsof people are responsible for our existence. There are no little mes or big yous and vice versa. Once we embrace this fact and realize that the same cycle is continuing, maybe we can get somewhere!

[Brandon Imhotep]

I think this goes perfectly with the interview! For my people that are not being man, evolving, submitting, non-thinking...... empower yourself to become free(r)!

[Clifford Black]

Please examine this poem line by line and post comments as you figure out what this great TEACHER was transmitting and then you will begin to learn how to commune with the ancestors (FOR REAL).
(b)

[Clifford Black]

Applicable then, Applicable NOW!