Once in Texas


ONCE IN TEXAS THEY HEARD



ten tweets from the mountain

in the drones of doom, in the trumpets of truth,

and  noon-lighted with anger

they counted their faces for righteousness.



How was it then reckoned, in lurid glass,

funky bullets should find home

a flaming house in America's past?

And who death-wise ordained that sins

would have reward in the caskets of their skins?





Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            November 7, 2017

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CLA paper

CLA,   April 6, 2018 Jerry W. Ward, Jr. PHBW:   Negotiating the Ideas of Seven Writers [1]                 Founded in 1983 by Dr. Maryemma Graham, "The Afro-American Novel Project" (AANP) had the initial goal of identifying all published novels written by African Americans from the nineteenth century to the late twentieth century.   AANP became The Project on the History of Black Writing (PHBW) in 1990 to reflect an enlarged vision and a more ambitious aim.   PHBW want to make a substantial contribution to what we then spoke of as our "Profession" by organizing bibliographic information and databases, sponsoring institutes and seminars, and by encouraging our colleagues to have rigorous engagements with all genres of black (African American) "writing" within   frames   of historical inquiry.                              The Project's   working frame was an   adaptation of the paradigm of unity in African American Studies , f
Read more

reading notes for September 23, 2019

Reading Notes for September 23, 2019 Eighteen years after the tragedy of 9/11 as I re-read Amiri Baraka's "Somebody Blew Up America" (2001), two meanderings occur: 1) a chance temptation to ask what the term "pro-Semitic" can mean in the contexts of (a) Israeli and world politics and (b) to what extent the amount of foreign aid the USA donates to Israel truly matters, and 2) a more focused temptation to ask if Morrison's Playing in the Dark sheds light on the motives that govern projects devoted to discussions of slavery beginning with 1619. I suspect those projects are at once very literary and very political. Such speculations arose during a September 12 conversation with one of my former UNCF/Mellon mentees whose research on redemption now teaches me, the former mentor, a few things about the urgency of scholarship in the twenty-first century.   The journey forth happens in the cognitive territory of "universal enslavement,"
Read more

Tell Them We Are Rising

TELL THEM WE ARE RISING TAKE ONE/ 16 February 2018                                                                                       Scene: Ash é Power House, 1731 Baronne Street, New Orleans, LA Act:   PBS/Indie Lens Film Screening: "Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Black Colleges and Universities" Purpose:   To view a short version of Stanley Nelson's most recent documentary, a visual narrative of many narratives, designed "to tell the dynamic story of Americans who refused to be denied a higher education and ---in their resistance --- created a set of institutions that would influence and shape the landscape of the country for centuries to come." (quoted from Ash é Cultural Arts Center newsletter, February 2018) Brief report on TAKE ONE                 My impressions of this documentary were prejudiced by (1) the advertising of the film, (2) my intimate knowledge of HBCUs from having been on the faculty of two of them fo
Read more