Black Poetry : with love on the road to porterville

romusthepoet

Well-Known Member
REGISTERED MEMBER
Nov 21, 2001
47
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with love on the road to porterville
by romus simpson

in the sleep gardens
alone behind the blue wall
that comes perfectly in each cell
a blue round and dark as night earth
lay us still in the beautiful indigo pasture
with its hanging grapes & moons

deep silver eye closed night velvet
the vowel filled night
& the dark green of this county
moved beneath night until we slept
then found ourselves at dawn
on the bus with swaddled migrant workers
who hide beautiful scars
who are closest to jesus
who are his illiterate apostles
whose faith rivals hunger
who are informal carpenters & beautifully unaware

& there among the morning spanish
where the mauve trail lay like rest
& unfurled sweet & dusty in it’s holy places
between a whole memory of flushing hay fields
an odd hill like a buddha
embers of clouds & quiet inferno dreams
the flame & water earth

& we traveled breath to breath
the collective morning cadencing in our throats
shutter of day fettered omens
stutter flashed & spoked through sun
speeding there the cleared land dropped away
harvested & as a country after war marched through
open for any idealology any song any future
any poem in any language
then the laughter of walnut groves patternless
as a room of men gambling and eating
coming & going
then gone at an exclamation of a road
where we motor against the morning shine
a regiment of exact almond trees
shadow in their bark
flashes toward winter

& at the ave. 86
cactus lines the tangerine orchards
like a thorny cross on the beautiful head of jesus
foreigners were being baptized in the clear roads
we met them
& waved & cried with them
shared coffee & fruit
the november san juaquin morning rolled
down the steep backcountry like a choir of bright water
you pushed against me
i stood perfectly still to create this memory
catalogued the minute the sun each asking eye
wondering who we are on the morning bus
not speaking spanish smiling out the windows
the saturday half shadow sun burning the bus brilliant
trucks broke seas of silence and posted the hour
oh, trucks working in god’s country
their thunder huffing through the wide morning
comet tails of swirling hay
on the two lane highway
dreaming of horses
my shirt billowed white
& bloomed all around me

what can be said of prophets
the poor who arrive in the belly of the sun
a man dreams of fruit &
another of a young girl who smiled at him
then a woman leans and touches me
she points to a child come to our knees
she has seen me chewing something
i hand her gum and the whole bus smiles
the woman’s hair streams from the windows
beautiful & profound on earth
because we form a new country
we sing
 

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