My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 62

from Requiem
to reclaim what’s taken from her, even if
we build earthen dams to block her reach
she will go around, under, or over,
& already the spine of their logbook
of calculations was broken & splayed
as newcomers hailed from far-reaches
as pirates, woodsmen, moneychangers,
merchants, blacksmiths, & gamblers,
(all hard men) ready to claim coffin-girls
sent by the high churches of France…

n
Yusef Komunyakaa, Blue Door

61

BLACK RENAISSANCE NOIRE

PHOTOGRAPH BY LAREN MCLUNG

& already The Book of the Dead
unfolded pages, & water rose
to leaf through the before
& after, the benedictions
& prayers spoken in tongues
rising in the tide of flotsam
& debris of fallen churches
across the Lower Ninth, slush
working its way up clapboard
& slave-brick walls of houses
tilted in a dirge, up the last rung
of the ladder, up to the voices
caught in an attic, & then stopped
in midair like a hundred washing
machines churning, & already
cries from a domed purgatory
broke from the storm within
where proxy armies clashed
on weekends, & for a moment,
as if we aren’t here, demons ride
the shoulders of outlaw angels
through streets of the antiworld
where thieves of bread & milk
are clubbed to the sidewalks,
but here on earth, the levee’s
uncorked boom drowns the solo
of Bolden’s cornet driving a note
up the river of rivers, saying,
I’m the mama & papa of ragtime,
& already an unearthly hush
was returning to the people
trapped behind barred windows
& waterlines measuring the sag
in the dragline as bottom fish
floated up, lost in the Big Muddy
unburying the wormy compost
of days rotting in the darkness,
& a wind-up toy inching along
crawfish mud & bloody slag,
& already they’re turning pages
of the uncharted old lost seasons
footnoted in the abridged maps
warning of man-eating savages,
to Jean Bapiste’s flotilla of six ships
bringing six carpenters & thirty convicts
to rip out miles & miles of saw vines
& dig trenches, born to erect makeshift
shelters of raw sappy wood & speculate
on their stolen dreams, the engineer
Pierre Blond de la Tour saying, No,
not here, the river will never stop trying