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so
grinly
wicked?
    I
    do not ask you why
    you have spurned,
    despised my love
    as something beneath you.
    We all have our ways and
    days
    but my love has been as constant
    as the rays
    coming from the earth
    or the sun,
    which you have used to obliterate
    me,
    and, now, according to your purpose,
    all mankind,
    from the nigger, to you,
    and to your children’s children.
    I have endured your fire
    and your whip,
    your rope,
    and the panic from your hip,
    in many ways, false lover,
    yet, my love:
    you do not know
    how desperately I hoped
    that you would grow
    not so much to love me
    as to know
    that what you do to me
    you do to you.
    No man can have a harlot
    for a lover
    nor stay in bed forever
    with a lie.
    He must rise up
    and face the morning sky
    and himself, in the mirror
    of his lover’s eye.
    You do not love me.
    I see that.
    You do not see me:
    I am your black cat.
    You forget
    that I remember an Egypt
    where I was worshipped
    where I was loved
.
    No one has ever worshipped you,
    nor ever can: you think that love
    is a territorial matter,
    and racial,
    oh, yes,
    where I was worshipped
    and you were hurling stones,
    stones which you have hurled at me,
    to kill me,
    and, now,
    you hurl at the earth,
    our mother,
    the toys which slaughtered
    Cain’s brother.
    What panic makes you
    want to die?
    How can you fail to look
    into your lover’s eye?
    Your black dancer
    holds the answer:
    your only hope
    beyond the rope.
    Of rope you fashioned,
    usefully,
    enough hangs from
    your hanging tree
    to carry you
    where you sent me.
    And, then, false lover,
    you will know
    what love has managed
    here below.

Inventory/On Being 52
    My progress report
    concerning my journey to the palace of wisdom
    is discouraging.
    I lack certain indispensable aptitudes.
    Furthermore, it appears
    that I packed the wrong things.
    I thought I packed what was necessary,
    or what little I had:
    but there is always something one overlooks,
    something one was not told,
    or did not hear.
    Furthermore,
    some time ago,
    I seem to have made an error in judgment,
    turned this way, instead of that,
    and, now, I cannot radio my position.
    (I am not sure that my radio is working.
    No voice has answered me for a long time now.)
    How long?
    I do not know.
    It may have been
    that day, in Norman’s Gardens,
    up-town, somewhere,
    when I did not hear
    someone trying to say: I love you.
    I packed for the journey in great haste.
    I have never had any time to spare.
    I left behind me
    all that I could not carry.
    I seem to remember, now,
    a green bauble, a worthless stone,
    slimy with the rain.
    My mother said that I should take it with me,
    but I left it behind.
    (The world is full of green stones, I said.)
    Funny
    that I should think of it now.
    I never saw another one like it —:
    now, that I think of it.
    There was a red piece of altar-cloth,
    which had belonged to my father,
    but I was much too old for it,
    and I left it behind.
    There was a little brown ball,
    belonging to a neighbor’s little boy.
    I still remember his face,
    brown, like the ball, and shining like the sun,
    the day he threw it to me
    and I caught it
    and turned my back, and dropped it,
    and left it behind.
    I was on my way.
    Drums and trumpets called me.
    My universe was thunder.
    My eye was fixed
    on the far place of the palace.
    But, sometimes, my attention was distracted
    by this one, or that one,
    by a river, by the cry of a child,
    the sound of chains,
    of howling. Sometimes
    the wings of great birds
    flailed my nostrils,
    veiled my face, sometimes,
    from high places, rocks fell on me,
    sometimes, I was distracted by my blood,
    rushing over my palm,
    fouling the lightning of my robe.
    My father’s son
    does not easily surrender.
    My mother’s son
    pressed on.
    Then,
    I began to imagine a strange thing:
    the palace never came any closer.
    I began, nervously, to check
    my watch, my compass, the stars:
    they all confirmed
    that I was almost certainly where I should