Poem about: They call it making love

And Zora.

1. I’ve just finished Dust Tracks on a Road, the memoir of Zora Neale Hurston, a woman writer who shouldered the Harlem Renaissance, raised herself from the dust of slavery, to spin in a cloud of glory, and go back to dust again, as we all must. Hers was a cold obscurity, until resurrected by Alice Walker. As a hip hop head, I used to listen to Olu Dara, father of iconic rapper Nas, croon about Zora in a moaning blues song. In her memoir, Zora wrote about writing her international hit novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God:

“It was dammed up in me, and I wrote it under internal pressure in seven weeks. I wish I could write it again. In fact, I regret all of my books…Perhaps it is just as well to be rash and foolish for a while. If writers were too wise, perhaps no books would get written at all.” Zora goes on, “Anyway, the force from somewhere in Space which commands you to write in the first place, gives you no choice. You take up the pen when you are told, and write what is commanded. There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.”

There are several places in her memoir that I felt my eyes clear. She and I stared at one another through a looking glass. I approached her lake. Bent to look closer at her reflection in the calm water. She took my hand, and we swam together through her visions, her survivorship, her journey in elite academia, her accolades, her not fitting into any one or anyone’s camp on race and all the rest of it, her settling down to obey the adamant writing gods. Do you know they still tell her story wrong? They call her the first Black republican and try to run a pin through her to peg her to one wall or another. She is more than this or that. Zora.

2. Poem about: They call it making love.

not sure why they called it
making love but im rimjhim
glad they did
mention making
with lips or hands
or i want to understand
do i see a smile at the 
edge of the world, a line 
two bodies pressed
in a chord
of wood, soft of soil
stump, rim and root 
shelters inside her
a maker space
a meet cute

Well, I have more to share. There's been some brave forays, and retreats even more daring. I'll be back next Monday, with more Poem About. 

RBS