Jerry Ward's Blogspot

OUR STATE (in memory of Virgia Brocks-Shedd, 1943-1992 ) In our youth, invisible empires secretly granted us a wisdom of silence, energy of tears to baptize spaces for our lives. We navigated rainbows of dust, linked by the crystals of fate and discontinuous sparkling of joy. Good morning, heartache, you always come again, good evening, mindscape, our faith-bound friend, good night, necessity, good night. Yes, the fierce silence of prayer guided our quest for sanctuary, for a peace we bravely misunderstood. Mississippi made us photographs of ourselves to accuse love and hate and chaos. Water, our first memory, the mother/father sea that tempest for   tasting the salted fruits of trees. Metaphysics of time leaned us and learned us to be tall pines in buckshot mud and sun-baked clay. Bogus vocabularies crammed our mouths as we shot the marbles   and jumped the ropes of the troubles a...

MAKING COMFORT on a needful day your terribleness troubles the house like thunderclaps ripping a Delta sky. You gather a bushel of autumn, run faithfilled fingers over your threads. Your needles of sunlight worry a healing into history. The ancient lady in your bones memories out the quilts. Her leafwork stitches spring invisible at the seams. You know winter starwars have designs to freeze our flesh. Your preternatural covers blithely summer us into dawn

A Statue by Fr é d é ric-Auguste Bartholdi Displayed   in an alien harbor, a difficult woman, blindfolded, less able to speak than Philomel deaf, unable to read Emma Lazarus, a difficult woman confirming inequity, unable to speak of abolition, torch on the right, law tablets on the left which   once gripped broken shackles, standing on chains like the Mother of God, a difficult woman, this Lady Liberty, an oxidized omen, promising naught more or less than a welcoming for them not for us, for them not for us, promising mercy, perpetuating misery, a difficult woman perspiring parfum de sang . Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             June 10, 2019

DISPLACED INFORMATION Zecker, Robert.   Metropolis: The American City in Popular Culture .   Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008. On page 117, Zecker writes: "The rats echo the grim opening of Richard Wright's novel of Chicago ghetto life, Native Son , in which Bigger Thomas battles to keep the vermin from his child's crib." It is an accident, one hopes, that led Zecker to confuse Bigger Thomas with Joe, "a frustrated ghetto father…played by James Earl Jones" in an episode of East Side/West Side , an early 1960s television series.   The episode was titled "Who Do You Kill?"   The title is generic.   It might have been used for a 1960s essay on black anger.   Joe's child is attacked by rats and dies in a hospital.   Enraged, Joe acquires a weapon and roams the streets of New York, seeking a person upon whom " to exact vengeance" (118). Zecker's point is that "Joe suffers and endures; unlike Bigger Thomas, he d...

Cultural Front: Poetry collections giving voice to J. Marion Sims’... : By Laura Vrana As they have always done, African American poets today often write about under-discussed issues that later emerge in ma...

POEM 76 Sunday mornings: Dad and I, dressed well, went   from 1831 "I" Street to Bladensburg Road for the Washington Post : his puzzle, my comics, his news,   our leisured journey, my proud amusement. We had class, I care to remember when I was five. Sunday afternoons: after the day's dinner---precisely at noon --- Mother, Dad, and I called on cousins or visited the zoo or saw our reflections in Lincoln's pool or made the most of fine weather as Dad's camera imaged us in black, grey, and white to   preserve, even now, the gloss and grandeur of our lives. We had class, I care to remember when I was five, before circumstances railroaded us out of Eden, deposited us to shock of home, the South, demanding I give up mirage of freedom and the fine nuances of the child I was in exchange for chaos,   resentment,   wisdom and fluent cursing, for the fierce measures of the man I am in a c...

Writing the Birthday Poem Each year I write a birthday poem (July 31, 1943), and whether the poem is fairly good or not so good hasn't been a cause for anxiety.   The one for 2019 is not cooperating.   It is resisting, and it demanded two preludes: Prelude for Poem 76 The face challenges the mirror; the mirror, the face. The space between has no wind, only an absence, the given probabilities   gambling in a vacuum of grief and alleged transgressions. Sirens of moonset become arrivals: ancestors burning signals of returning, of unrequested volitions, you deem, in jest, a mystery of performing. Are you now bereft of shame as David Walker and James Joyce speak your name?                 May 17, 2019 Second prelude for Poem 76 Old gods purge grave logic reverse the hearse make life best death in the bargain. ...