Okemah, Oklahoma
© C.C. Brooks
 

SKIN

Ancestors

They thought old wounds would heal
Even the deep ones they salved with boiling peppered pitch
As if lashes weren’t enough

And wounds from disease

From the swindle and forced march
Clearcutting the Chickasaw church
Its canopy a vast cathedral

In Syria

A deflagration
A boy’s face painted with red clay and ash
His cataract tears channeling through
Falling to the ground

So strange to know the stratigraphy of a nation

Its sins sharp stones under naked feet
To know the present is not unlike the past
Except for geography
The globalization of sin

A man with two countries

My sheet metal skin riveted
And cabin-pressurized against the cold realities of my work
Becoming soft in the night
Away from that place
A moonflower
Drinking the light of the Milky Way
Where their souls traveled   
After the final lash
The fatal march
After the bombs fell
 

Gold mining in the Congo
Source:  Internet

“The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.”

          -Ralph Ellison

SMILES

I see the biggest smiles in thrift stores –

Lunatic smiles, glad to have survived
the night smiles, happy to have a job
smiles.  And the stumble-on smiles after
finding some private treasure. 

But some only frown.  One time I bumped

into a big wig from work.  He acted
awkward, ashamed, as if I’d discovered
his big secret.  I said Don’t worry man,
I won’t tell, as he looked down his nose
at my private treasure.  Then, ever so slowly,
his frown turned into a sneaky smile. 

And old man flashed his teeth above

the winter coat rack.  He said, Man I
sure love that jacket.  I said Thanks, I think
I bought it here.  Later I saw him up at the
counter, tuning an old guitar.  Then he
let her rip, sending the blues into that place. 
Where it needed no interpretation.  Where
it was needed the most.  Then a man walked
in the front door yelling, Keb’ Mo’ at the
Thrift Sto’!  And I looked around.  Nothing
but golden smiles on Woody’s people. 





Utah Stars
Source:  Feather

Aleppo, Syria 
source: Joseph Eid/AFP/Getty Images