I
God of my fathers,
Please accept these lips
You flattened on my face
With your long kiss;
These lips that lose their way
Around your name…
Accept these eyes
Which cannot pierce the veil
Bonded like plywood
For three-hundred years.
I claim you kin
By virtue of the fact
That the Sun’s love
Was burned into my genes
Not to curse Ham,
But to caress a soul
Which can create
Black, tan, beige joy
And fling it in the face
Of Blue-eyed Death
II
I claim you kin
By virtue of the fact
That I can translate Hell
Into a Spiritual;
Can ‘make a joyful noise’
Before the tree of death;
Before the polls Scylla
And Charybdis guard
With charred perversions
Of their Son-of-God.
I claim you kin
By virtue of the fact
That I shall walk again
Through the White Sea,
A child from your
Black Phallus on each hand,
Another…as a smile
Within my eyes,
Into the fecund womb
Of man’s birth-rights.
There is no death
Can alter me from this.
III
Then…only then,
When all our sons are men
And not the petty
Function of their skins,
I want to lie
Ten-thousand miles removed
And hear my brother
Oozing through the brush
At break of day,
Plucking our lunch,
Which stands upon four legs,
From throbbing life.
Poet and playwright Hazel Crawley was a Newark native. “Taproots” appeared in her collection Erratica in 1975.
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