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45 resources. Showing results 21 through 30.
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Draft, He Shall Be Nameless
HE SHALL BE NAMELESS Fair Copy 2
![ah crease his paper roun the
Bobby Seale
foldin it slow for his arm.
Them brothers
getting they vitamin D
getting they 7-de/hy/dro
cho/les/ter/ol--
yeah--
when that blackness come
they gonna live.
1970
19[undecipherable]
Black Man, 13th Floor
Hotel Ameridemocratogrando
12 floors below me, 12 above
stops nothing at my life
(this 13th floor
this legacy from black charioteers
swung low, stolen away
ridin middle passage
between the breathin floors
ashcakers brought to bed on clay
massa’s thirteeners](https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/system/resource/f/6/e/f6ec82ae-7f65-4f12-b43a-7a85bf00f73c/attachment/fe86336d9bd0fc2e85e9b07218d94721.jpg)
Black Man, 13th Floor (with annotations) 1
![134
[*“Where Will Their Names Go Down?”: Many bodies of Black people murdered in racist violence have been thrown into the three rivers mentioned--including the body of the boy in “Emmett Till.” The phrase “foundations of the world” comes from the author’s memory of Melville’s treatment of Pip’s terror in Moby Dick, afloat in the sea.*]
[*The title chosen reflects my writing a letter to the New York headquarters of the NAACP (unanswered) suggesting that the names of ordinary African Americans who had suffered violent or severe punishment for demanding their civil rights (especially voting rights then) be recorded in The Congressional Record.*)
Where Will Their Names Go Down?
Where will their names go down,
Our bloodied boys
Sunk link by link--
Socket, bone, and upright knee--
Muscled down dead
In the Tallahatchie, the Mississippi, and the Pearl?
Will they rise again
Except to velvet eyes
And rainbow fins that piece the deep?
Except to flush in streams that knife the seas
And rush their secrets through foundations of the world?
Right before our eyes
They sank, and pulled us to their knees.
From swollen prayers we rise to fiercely shake a chain of days
That blurry hang across that dying scrawl,
That mannish blood that moves
The Tallahatchie, the Mississippi, and the Pearl
1967
1968](https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/system/resource/4/7/7/477bf8a4-0019-4758-ab37-445bdd5b3e26/attachment/d1e75022c8d1f1fadca6aa1d17748f36.jpg)
Where Will Their Names Go Down? (with annotations)
![183
[*”Emmett Till”: The footnote on page 4 of Mailing #1 refers to the murder of the 14-year-old boy. The editors of the anthology Mandals: Literature for Critical Analysis first noted the legendary quality intended in this poem. Chaucer’s story of the rumored whistling by the murdered boy whose throat was cut in the ghetto, as remembered by the poet in this case, made the connection with Emmett Till that inspired the writing of the poem.*]
Emmett Till1
I hear a whistling
Through the water.
Little Emmett
Won’t be still.
He keeps floating
Round the darkness,
Edging through
The silent chill.
Tell me, please,
That bedtime story
Of the fair
River Boy
Who swims forever,
Deep in treasures,
Necklaced in
A coral toy.
1963
1963
1In 1955, Till, a fourteen-year-old from Chicago, for allegedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi, was murdered by white men who tied a gin mill fan around his neck and threw his body into the Tallahatchie River.
[*The footnote in the widely-known The Norton Introduction to Poetry, 3d edn, 1986, reads: “In 1955, a fourteen-year-old from Chicago, was lynched in Mississippi for allegedly making improper advances toward a white woman.”*]](https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/system/resource/9/a/9/9a9bb7e2-4260-43d7-a93b-b61751891f6f/attachment/10c5511aa0d725d51e9e5a937fa5a868.jpg)
Emmett Till (with annotations)
Panther Man
![Poem begun at 3, rue du Midi, B 129, Toulouse, 7 July 1980, 8:55 p.m.—10:25.
(Idea from drive from le Barry to Toulouse yesterday afternoon.)
Revised in Bulgaria, 14 Jul 1980, 3:14 p.m.—4:28 (Preslav notel, Near Vana, in Zlatni Pjasaci, 15-19 July
Title changed 17 July.
SCARECROW, U.S.A.: THE ROAD TO TOULOUSE
A man, hanging stiffly from [the] the roadside tree,
[smeared] dyed my eyes awake with [dying] smears of sunlight,
burst my after-luncheon calm [against the] into some rolling scream
our tires must have sucked into the road
[turning] [curving] twisting out of sight [the] that dangling arm.
“What’s the French word for scarecrow?”
[was] strung out the [rope I climbed to stay aboard] rope I clung to. She steadied it with words,
drove slower till I [heard] understood “Some famers over here
[*19 July. Not like America, I guess?]
[hang] put them in [the] trees. They get in cherry trees”--
and the birds, she meant--“and chuk-chuk-chuk:
all you get is holes.”
I felt the cutting of the beak. The man’s head
Was [missing] gone, back there in the leaves, the limbs
I hadn’t [seen] caught it. The other arm, yes,
[a twist] its tendons of straw clinched for [the] his signature:
[* 16 July: indent 5 spaces or more]
[the] his bled-out warming
[that] from the tinsel-threaded legs, [*Put on line by itself (15 July)*]
the [blowing] [flashing] ravaged vest
the [flap-fringed] [undecipherable] flapping space [*Put on line by itself (16 July)*]
[imagination spun and scoured around/above the broomstick neck
all clarified/signified a matching face
imagination spun and scoured so hopefully
above the splintered broomstick neck
(oh, how imagination spun there, and scoured so hopelessly
to cast a human face!)
15 July, 11:50 a.m.—12:33
16 July, 11:56 a.m.—12:35, 2:10 p.m.—2:48; 3:55—4:27; 5:52—6:48
17 July 11:52 a.m.-12:28
below the bludgeoned [undecipherable] hat,
above the splintered broomstick neck,
(oh, how imagination spun around it,
scouring hopelessly to raise a human face!)
illiterate even, an X, any breathing scar,
some sign enforceable, acknowledging [a past,] people-past, a debt to pay, a surname [dragging] tracing back to wilderness
where family of outlaws, musketry [and]/or cannonball
blazed legacies through [undecipherable] tents and huts, and wild birds witnessing
[and] while wild birds witness[ing]es [undecipherable] and exchanged their chaos in the trees
19 July, 9:25 a.m.—10:10 a.m.
his personal X is last spasm, he marked [*replace “an X... line*]](https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/system/resource/8/0/c/80cf460b-3b3f-4e87-84fd-50c513e2ecc0/attachment/bfc18ee3ddc46c090e188aabcf02f76c.jpg)
Draft, SCARECROW, U.S.A.: THE ROAD TO TOULOUSE
HE SHALL BE NAMELESS Fair Copy 1
I Touched the Hand of a Soldier Dead (with annotations) 2