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• 1 2018-10-25T01:27:58-07:00 To Miss Ethel Trew Dunlap, and other Black Women Poets 3 plain 2018-10-25T18:55:15-07:00

  by Jessica Covil Listen

  Yes! There is no way to begin

  except in exclamations,

  the way you reach out through the print

  and make yourself heard.

   

  Yes! You have made yourself known

  amidst every lie flung against you.

  The ink dries and there you are:

  black on a white background

  speaking.

   

  And you can be as brazen

  as any man,

  but with a twist--

  a militant with hips,

  the curve of your lips

  giving birth with new words

  like God Himself

  turning the lights on.

  Electric.

   

  Like when Carita Collins

  had the U.S. Attorney General

  running scared

  the year the black soldiers came home

  to Jim Crow and more lynchings,

  and she penned it:

  “This must not be!”

  And “New Negroes” the world over

  AGREED.

   

  Or Ethel Trew Dunlap,

  whose poems were an archive

  of freedom fighters,

  “Four Million Strong” and growing.

  She dreamed of dying one night

  but kept going.

   

  Black women poets--

  you spoke of winning a higher place,

  you made yourselves a space          

  in the pages of a weekly

  and all the borders they crossed.

  Liberty was a song repeated,

  chanted and enchanting.

   

  You sang Garvey’s praises

  and he sang yours too,

  named you queen of all women.

  Black woman,

  he said,

  your eyes shine with virtue.

   

  And this was the price paid

  to restore your “good name”:

  to be a sweet maid,

  a virgin.

   

  Perhaps that explains why

  Africa was rarely called “Mother”

  when the womb was a fraught space,

  a wound left open

  like a field

  where the seeds grown

  were planted by force;

  and the men who defiled you

  labeled you

  “whores.”

   

  Instead

  you would be roses:

  something delicate

  something cherished

  both desired and protected--

  a thorn in the hand

  of any who would pluck you.

   

  But I can see

  how you grew your own garden,

  a community of poets

  by calling out each others’ names

  like the women before you,

  dedicating a line or two

  to the women you cherished.

  Not because any man told you to.

   

  I know that

  poetry has a spirit

  --is spirit--

  a growing from the Earth

  with some heaven in mind.

  When you were buried in the dirt,

  how did it feel to come so close to the sky?