Uplift, self-help, Reconstruction. Blackbird blues in May.
Leaden dimes of Dunbar: paying dues to Million Dollar
Pictures. You're history now, as Eubie Blake piano rags.
Pickford's eyelash flutters billboards, while Josey Baker,
just fifteen, skelters out a catwalk chorus line the day
we see Fritz Lang's Fury, a race flick sequel to Birth of a Nation,
war unravelling in the veteran colored streets of Tulsa, 1921.
Sheriff McCullough cants a biplane west, shunting TNT
on Negro Wall Street: Williams Dreamland Theater
shows Crimson Skull, a silent shot in all-black Boley,
Oklahoma, and From Harlem to the Rhine, and ads
for Murnau's Golem. Uplift, self-help, Reconstruction.
Greenwood Avenue's a mortar storm, way before Scottsboro,
Robeson, Oscar Micheaux's hands held out to sweeten
what's pan-African here in the uncivilest of states.
The facade's on fire, the wicker seats gut out,
the balustrade all charred: we pour out into the riot--
lynchtalk, gossip, cotton song, pride and glory waste.
Five years past, we're chatty on Mt. Zion Church stone steps,
on a Sunday of opening camelias, but scars are calcified,
caught in the celluloid that curled into ash that night.

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