This comes from a convo with a good friend of mine, C. Liegh McInnis, a professor in the English Department at Jackson State University:
I have to give this song an “F-“. Being a former closet country fan of sorts, I do know that the one thing that would allow me to get past the annoying “twang”…
:)
Killer Mike
Get a bookshelf Killer Mike!!
If this ain’t Jocephus Martin…
I don’t know who is…
bob & weave like boxers pulling
punches, shadowing each other,
sparring across the slack cord
casting parabolas in the air. They
whip quick as an infant’s pulse
and the jumper, before she
enters the winking, nods in time
as if she has a notion to share,
waiting her chance to speak. But she’s
anticipating the upbeat
like a bandleader counting off
the tune they are about to swing into.
The jumper stair-steps into mid-air
as if she’s jumping rope in low-gravity,
training for a lunar mission. Airborne a moment
long enough to fit a second thought in,
she looks caught in the mouth bones of a fish
as she flutter-floats into motion
like a figure in a stack of time-lapse photos
thumbed alive. Once inside,
the bells tied to her shoestrings rouse the gods
who’ve lain in the dust since the Dutch
acquired Manhattan. How she dances
patterns like a dust-heavy bee retracing
its travels in scale before the hive. How
the whole stunning contraption of girl and rope
slaps and scoops like a paddle boat.
Her misted skin arranges the light
with each adjustment and flex. Now heather-
hued, now sheen, light listing on the fulcrum
of a wrist and the bare jutted joints of elbow
and knee, and the faceted surfaces of muscle,
surfaces fracturing and reforming
like a sun-tickled sleeve of running water.
She makes jewelry of herself and garlands
the ground with shadows.
gregory pardlo, double dutch. (via black-poetry)
WoW.
Writing legends Amiri Baraka and Maya Angelou dancing on ashes of Langston Hughes buried under Artwork in the atrium of the Schomburg Center.
Highlighting the ancient African rite of ancestral return, on top of the tiled artwork titled, Rivers. Others poured ceremonial drinks from five rivers and read four poems of Langston Hughes.
Similar ceremonies were scheduled for five rivers: The Mississippi, the Coatzacoalcos in Mexico, the Murrumbidgee in Australia, the Amazon in Brazil and the Congo in Zaire. (Feb. 22, 1991)
“I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I’ve known rivers… Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”
~Langston Hughesvia vince cushite FB page
Like, I share my birthday with THIS!!!
Happy 42nd birthday, Nia Long!!
Only a God above that sits on high! Man cannot make it for ya! They can take the picture, but they can’t make it…
CHRIS GUILLEBEAU: 11 ways to be average (x)
Fresh and local food.
Cool as a cucumber.
This gives me feelings of nostalgia, it’s pictures like this that give me these mass feelings of pride in our culture.
Brothas.
“I read everything. I read my way out of the two libraries in Harlem by the time I was thirteen. One does learn a great deal about writing this way. First of all, you learn how little you know. It is true that the more one learns the less one knows. I’m still learning how to write. I don’t know what technique is. All I know is that you have to make the reader see it.”
“God’s Trombones-The Prodigal Son: Your Arms Are Too Short to Box With God” composed by Chris Crenshaw(30) the youngest of Wynton Marsalis’s Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.
