Affirmation: A Monologue Poem
1
I gave this world a song.
the sounds of my life, my voice,
my weeping, my laughter.
I gave this world my strength.
I drenched it in my tears so that
it grew crops of prosperity.
I oiled its wheels with the rumbling
reasonance of my existence.
2
In the wind,
and in the bluesy blue flame of fires,
I can see and I can hear the stories
of my passages in time.
I am so many women, you cannot rightly
name me. So many spirits of our dead
rest in my breasts, I cannot know
myself as one woman either.
3
I died in the heat of a Harlem or Detroit or
South African or Chicago summer night, my
throat/gruff, stuffed with the dreams of all my kind
around me. But when I died, I had planted fire
seeds in the children all around me.
Each time breath left a body, a fire burning
inside to survive ran rampant in my people’s souls;
those breaths became the very air breathed in
the poverty that screamed nothing and nobody.
4
Garbage of old used lives. The stench of
putrified dreams.
All in the streets with the sweet greenery of youth.
A scrawny stubborn tree or bush or a
scrawny gang of boys and girls, laughing and
talking, their living full of themselves,
stutters the eyes and makes the unbelievers
know the meaning of grace and mercy.
5
A wind blows all the way up the Mississippi River
from the south with the sweet scent of honeysuckle,
lilac, or magnolia. It weaves in and out of the
blue light, red light nights, in and out of the
wine and whiskey avenues and stumbles through
the streets,
hung up in the air where the red eyes and stubborn
dreams live.
Cardboard and stone altars to God, the storefront churches
hug the soul’s misery away. Tell the sad soul and spirit
their survival secrets.
Whisper sweet songs and the miracle veiled stories of
millions of Joshua’s fittin’ de battles of all the Jericho’s
of Daniels in de lions den, of Moses’ barefoot
before God and the burning bushes
like the burning hearts.
6
And ain’t I a woman, Winnie Mandela once cried
out in a lonely year on a lonely night.
a lone spent life
as Nelson’s imprisoned pulse became the drumbeat from
the prison roar of freedom’s call.
and ain’t I a woman, women have cried as they
struggled to break the yoke of worldly evils.
Yes, Black spirit in the world moaned. Yes, it affirmed.
If we can be the best of what we were, why our future
will exist through the best efforts from our past. Our
newness will gain its momentum from the bone
and marrow of oldness!
Come then Sojourner, come Harriet, come then
Bethune, come Wheatley, come Zora.
We will arise as One valiant victorious dream. One triumph
for one here, for one there, for one in life, from one
in death, for millions of ones, an army of ones,
marching all over the world!
trampling out the sodden, miserable dreams of frustration
and failure.
We will do this. We will be this for our strength,
our liberty, our lives.
It has already begun. Yes. It has. It was, even in
our crossing over.
Yes, Black Spirit in the world moaned. Yes, Black
Spirit in the world affirmed.
Notes:
From Affirmation (Eden Press, 2005). Reproduced with permission of Nina Rodgers Gordon.
This poem is part of the portfolio “Carolyn Marie Rodgers: What Beauty We Now Have” from the October 2022 issue.
Source:
Poetry
(October 2022)
