Flowers For Socrates

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

February is Black History Month in the United States. When Martin Luther King Jr. made his famous speech, “I Have a Dream,” in 1963, he wasn’t the first African-American to talk about a dream for a better and more just America, fulfilling the promise from its declaration as a nation that “all men are created equal.”

Here are four black poets – Lucille Clifton, Robert Hayden, Alice Walker and Langston Hughes, with fears and rage, as well as dreams, for their country.

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Lucille Clifton’s poem imagines the thoughts of James Byrd, Jr., a 49-year-old African-American man, who was dragged by white racists for three miles behind a pickup-truck, conscious through most of the ordeal, until he hit the edge of a culvert, which severed his head and right arm. The murderers dumped the rest of his body in front of a black cemetery in Jasper, Texas. His horrible death caused the state of Texas to pass a hate crimes law, and later led, with the murder of Matthew Shepard, to the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, signed into law by President Barack Obama on October 28, 2009.

jasper texas 1998

for j. byrd

i am a man’s head hunched in the road.
i was chosen to speak by the members
of my body. the arm as it pulled away
pointed toward me, the hand opened once
and was gone.

why and why and why
should i call a white man brother?
who is the human in this place,
the thing that is dragged or the dragger?
what does my daughter say?

the sun is a blister overhead.
if i were alive i could not bear it.
the townsfolk sing we shall overcome
while hope bleeds slowly from my mouth
into the dirt that covers us all.
i am done with this dust. i am done.

“jasper texas 1998” from Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000, © 2000 by Lucille Clifton – BOA Editions, Ltd.

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