Blue Collar Broadcast

American Poets
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Beaver Dam Rocking Chair Marathon

Tapping My Own Phone

Blue Collar Boom

Goose

Tour Log: August 15th, 1998

  Featured poetry by Lamont Steptoe

i dream of you
now lost in the rubble
of an American Beirut
pinned down in U.S. Baghdad's
flipped out in the toxic fumes
of media scud
i dream of you
like slaves dreamed of the North Star
the Mason-Dixon line
the Canadian border
i dream of you
like a Harlem kid named James Baldwin
like Baby Doc fleeing Haitian rage
i dream of you
like Richard Wright, Chester Himes,
and Josephine Baker
leaving the United Confederate States
with no more mastery of French
than my first name
and my daughter's first name
I dream of your Left Banks
your Seine
your catacombs
I follow the sharps and flats
drums and bass notes of dead American
jazz men and Black GI's who kissed and fucked your women
fought in your bars -- liberated you
howled at the moon
weeped in the arms of foreign talkin'
white folks who paid
to hear / see / read
our river-bottom-catfish-whiskered-banjo-
delta-lightin'-hollerin'-gospel-shoutin' blues
I fly to you
across the razor wire rimming American shores
I lift up
out of my Gaza strip
like High John de Conqueror
hearin' his people cry
Shango's hammer
for a heartbeat
if I have to be a stranger
if I have to be a stranger
if I have to be a stranger
let me uproot everything
landing like a storm tossed tree
my life's been a season of hurricanes
a winter of forest fires
a spring of snow drifts
I come to the foreign legion
of your population
a Christ
on a planet of Romans
in Vietnam
I was nailed to the sky
since birth
Centurions have hunted me
I have called for my brothers from the stars
I have called for my Father
from the other side of Time
O Paris
I am your refugee
not yet arrived!

2/22/91