My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 105

104

By
TYEHIMBA
JESS

Colonel Robert Gould Shaw
Marble, 1864. Edmonia Lewis

Hagar in the Wilderness
Carved Marble. Edmonia Lewis, 1875

The enemy buried me with my brothers
in blue. Our bloodlines mingled
in the mangled, makeshift ditch,
burrowed beneath sand and grit
to huddle in Earth’s quarried
memory. We lay head to head,
bone to bone with eternity.
Then, her hands summoned me:
bade marble breathe these eyes,
speak these lips. So, I face the world
again, wishing I could call my men,
once more, to stand at attention…
Rigby, who’d drawl curses on Rebs
while drawing Colt revolvers;
Alison, who’d sworn not to die
‘til whipping his old master, his father,
before his freed mother’s eyes;
Roper, his every inch mapped with lashmarks that branded his route through hell…
and 1100 more in the ‘54
with 1100 blue - black stories to tell.
Her hands somehow searched out
each tale those men carved into my face,
scraping away marmoreal
myths that define which race
might rule. She cut dark witness
into this bust that carries forth
my image: proof that, in the end,
it’s immortal stone that wins
when we’re all dead and
finished.

My God is the living God,
God of the impertinent exile.
An outcast who carved me
into an outcast carved
by sheer and stony will
to wander the desert
in search of deliverance
the way a mother hunts
for her wayward child.
God of each eye fixed to heaven,
God of the fallen water jug,
of all the hope a vessel holds
before spilling to barren sand.
God of flesh hewn from earth
and hammered beneath a will
immaculate with the power
to bear life from the lifeless
like a well in a wasteland.
I’m made in the image of a God
that knows flight but stays me
rock still to tell a story ancient
as slavery, old as the first time
hands clasped together for mercy
and parted to find only their own
salty blessing of sweat.
I have been touched by my God
in my creation, I’ve known her caress
of anointing callus across my face.
I know the lyric of her pulse
across these lips… and yes,
I’ve kissed the fingertips
of my dark and mortal God.
She has shown me the truth
behind each chiseled blow
that’s carved me into this life,
the weight any woman might bear
to stretch her mouth toward her
one true God, her own
beaten, marble song.