Liberty Gives Me the Language of the Gods to Tell Them That I Am Free
Something in this world a man must trust. Not everything-but something. One can not live and doubt everybody and everything. Somewhere in this world, and not beyond it, there is trust, and somehow trust leads to joy.
–W.E.B. DuBois
since we are in an American cycle
I call on you August Wilson
I will reinvent Othello before the golden
earring was given to Robeson
he was only seventeen, a tragedian
by death of audience, by trial and jury
the consequence his on defense
a bondsman in a free land
so he runs beyond the border
to escape the pestilence
to escape the prejudice only to find
Wagner, but the master has no
jurisdiction over spirit, only the physical
the the cooper and the goldsmith
the witchery of vainglory
so the playbook must be dusted off
like the records of Gunnersbury Cemetery
must be dusted off from the Jim Crow
and Potter’s Field, it must be found
in the exquisite corpse of the dead among us.
If I contain the language of the gods
then I am truly free
voice is translucent, only casting itself
within the wind, within the lieder or the chanson
but it remains authentic, autotelic
like the truncated tropes of the past
dead bury the dead
but when must freedom come
when the viciousness and vindication
is as supreme as the anti-semitism
when we are afraid to embrace
the truth, will come forth like the gospel
of Martin Luther King, Madiba lays in state
in the mother’s womb of our humanity
so the frame friezes hear
so the fences that are created on stage
in the human drama and the saga of this
century will outlive our reality
it is how we use this power of language
to seek manumission like the abolitionist-
phoneticians, we come back to the old,
to the landmark of trust, we salvage
and sabotage the Pax Romana, the fragment
of this bitter dialect and we make semantic
we subject, we predicate, this is our object
there is only one who will abject.
Robert Anthony Gibbons has been nominated for a Pushcart for his poem, “a self taught genius” by Great Weather for Media, Robert has been published in hundreds of literary magazines and in several notable anthologies. Recent publication credits include Killens Review, Tribes, Involuntary Magazine, Peregrine, Expound, Promethean, Turtle Island Quarterly, Killer Whales and Suisun Valley Review, and Voices of Lefferts. Robert’s first collection, Close to the Tree was published by Three Rooms Press, 2012.
The Marbled Sigh 