Detroit
We are stardust in the fearful void,
we are Tuareg in the waterless empire.This land is our father whose hair is jet;
it is our mother who is beautiful:
Antimony eyes, pomegranate lips...
County guys bring bitumen to fill
the potholes of our Red Bull washboardlife of peaks and valleys, highs and lows!
mom and dad sing to us until we shine!
The last drive-in picture show in Detroit,
filled with the gaudy films of memory:
when we were homicide perp-walk city!
Space heaters and cracked plaster...
Henry Ford and Malcolm X...Going to Quebec to bury Aunt Stell,
a boy says "Hear yer from Hockey Town, eh?"
No comic epitaphs, no eulogy;
We are the Bedouin of this New Age.
The Old Kingdom gives way to the New;
and the Motown Spring - neither ornamentnor imitation - was the harmony
of the spheres that drove our autos a while...
bring us our Prom Tux limos of desire!
bring us industry Elijah hearses of fire!
On the river there's the Don't-Look-Back Shack
most people call the Renaissance Center,
but history is coke and cognac...
that's suicide by a two-liter!
--
notes
Detroit
look to the future, not the past.
perp-walk : the walk from the DA's office to the jail
coke and cognac: suicide drink; I knew a fellow Marcus who loved it. He was in love with a beautiful girl who lived in Ontario. When she split, he killed himself. He could not live in the future without his past continuing on.
Bedouins: to the eye of moderns, a poor people, but the basis of the future when the cities have died.
I did not plan on having two Detroit poems, one after another, but that's life in the big city.
--
2 comments:
I have hope for Detroit. I really do.
Detroit has got to get out of the past and get into the future.
Post a Comment