We Shall Not Be Moved

We shall not, we shall not be moved
We shall not, we shall not be moved
Just like a tree that’s standing by the water
We shall not be moved

We shall not, we shall not be moved
We shall not, we shall not be moved
The union is behind us
We shall not be moved

We shall not, we shall not be moved
We shall not, we shall not be moved
We’re fighting for our freedom
We shall not be moved

We shall not, we shall not be moved
We shall not, we shall not be moved
We’re fighting for our children
We shall not be moved

We shall not, we shall not be moved
We shall not, we shall not be moved
We’ll building a mighty union
We shall not be moved

We shall not, we shall not be moved
We shall not, we shall not be moved
Black and white together
We shall not be moved

We shall not, we shall not be moved
We shall not, we shall not be moved
Young and old together
We shall not be moved

--Traditional African American spiritual and protest song

Scripture Reference: Psalm 112:1-9, (10), 5th Sunday after Epiphany A

The legendary Mavis Staples singing this song and telling how it plays a part in the Civil Rights Movement:

He Said

“Your garden at dusk
Is the soul of love
Blurred in its beauty
And softly caressing;
I, gently daring
This sweetest confessing,
Say your garden at dusk
Is your soul. My Love.”

-- Anne Spencer (1882-1975), African American poet, civil rights leader, librarian, and gardener.

Lines to a Nasturtium (A Lover Muses)

Flame-flower, Day-torch, Mauna Loa,

I saw a daring bee, today, pause, and soar,
Into your flaming heart;
Then did I hear crisp, crinkled laughter
As the furies after tore him apart?
A bird, next, small and humming,
Looked into your startled depths and fled . . .
Surely, some dread sight, and dafter
Than human eyes as mine can see,
Set the stricken air waves drumming
In his flight.

Day-torch, Flame-flower, cool-hot Beauty,
I cannot see, I cannot hear your flutey;
Voice lure your loving swain,
But I know one other to whom you are in beauty
Born in vain:
Hair like the setting sun,
Her eyes a rising star,
Motions gracious as reeds by Babylon, bar
All your competing;
Hands like, how like, brown lilies sweet,
Cloth of gold were fair enough to touch her feet.
Ah, how the sense reels at my repeating,
As once in her fire-lit heart I felt the furies
Beating, beating.

-- Anne Spencer (1882-1975), African American poet of the Harlem Renaissance, librarian, civil rights activist, and gardener.

if mama/ could see

if mama
could see
she would see
lucy sprawling
limbs of lucy
decorating the
backs of chairs
lucy hair
holding the mirrors up
that reflect odd
aspects of lucy.

if mama
could hear
she would hear
lucysong rolled in the
corners like lint
exotic webs of lucysighs
long lucy spiders explaining
to obscure gods.

if mama
could talk
she would talk
good girl
good girl
good girl

clean up your room.


-- Lucille Clifton, 1936-2010, African American poet, children's book author, Maryland's Poet Laureate 1974-1985, and professor, from Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969-1980.

Pestilence

Six thousand men strong, the army poured toward the sea.
Slavery’s wide wings gliding overhead
spread an infecting shadow as, step by step,
they swept like a battalion of ravenous ants,
advancing through the landscape and leaving a stench
drenched in sweat, shit, vomit, terror, and smoke.
The gentlefolk of every village burned,
borne by the black tide, shuffled in the slavers’ wake,
awake for the first time to a larger fate,
indeterminate but nasty: on the world stage
in an age when a workforce could be bought and sold.
Golden, the flow of human life down the green slopes.
Hopes shriveled in the glare of the distant bright
whitewashed castle’s acrid glitter in sunlight.


--Marilyn Nelson,  (1946- ), African American poet and translator, Poet Laureate of Connecticut, from Faster Than Light, 2012

Image: Sculpture by Edmonia Lewis (1844-1907), "Forever Free," 1867

Translation

We trekked into a far country,
My friend and I.
Our deeper content was never spoken,
But each knew all the other said.
He told me how calm his soul was laid
By the lack of anvil and strife.
“The wooing kestrel,” I said, “mutes his mating-note
To please the harmony of this sweet silence.”
And when at the day’s end
We laid tired bodies ’gainst
The loose warm sands,
And the air fleeced its particles for a coverlet;
When star after star came out
To guard their lovers in oblivion—
My soul so leapt that my evening prayer
Stole my morning song!

-- Anne Spencer (1882-1975), African American poet of the Harlem Renaissance, civil rights leader, librarian, and gardener.

For the Union Dead

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March, 
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die—
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flag
 quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year—
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .

Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessèd break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

-- Robert Lowell (1917-1977), from Collected Poems, 2003.



Image: Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, By Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 1888.