If one is fortunate and I can’t speak for everyone
but some may receive a gift
A talent
lever to pull in cases of emergency
Like the black box found in planes with instructions on how to survive
Something, someone that serves as a preserver
A raft in flood waters
As many of you know my lifeline has always been poetry
From the time I was eight years old
I heard an infomercial for poetry by Maya Angelou
And Still I Rise
It opened up the windows
made me know what is possible
which is why I can’t disparage anything about Maya Angelou
as some do
because she saved me
I always wanted to write a children’s story about a hero called poetry
That in dire times we can speak and create her
As an aside, I often wonder about America’s fascination
with superheroes
Perhaps its alter ego Jekyll and Hyde
That a country on the regular that commits atrocities
could have its heart in children’s stories and superheroes
a sign it never grew up
Just so you know I was offended by Black Panther being
categorized as a drama at the Academy Awards
And the decision in New York to rerelease it in theaters during
Black history month
so all Black children could see it
Just imagine if white history was shown once a year instead of year round
How would they feel if the movie about them was The Incredibles
Just saying
Anyway it was education that led me out of the suburbs
and sure fate for Black girls and women to Northeastern University
I attended with Wendy Williams
There again I discovered through the African American Institute
poetry and theater
Still it was writing and theater that led me to The New School
that led me to my first writing class with Jane Lazarre
When I wrote about a girl, a Black girl that caused nothing but shame and pain
A Black girl so ugly her own mother would not accept her
cursed from birth until death
Left to wage her own war on the world that cursed her
She knew it was me
She wrote at the bottom of my papers
Yours is the best poetry and writing I’ve read
in all my years of teaching
Her words gave me for the first time
a sense of worth and purpose
And after I’d gotten heavily into drugs
one morning in a lower east side tenement
the sky was purple and blue
strung out I decided to jump from the roof
and kill myself
The only thing I could think to live for was poetry
I’m saying all of this to say
have taken the long scenic route to tell you
It was me not a craft
that became my mother’s hero
I was a champion from the early age of nine
during my father’s beatings when she would instruct me to call the police
Later when over the holidays he gave her nothing I stole
from dept stores to give her presents
And she would taunt my father
saying my daughter will give me presents
As an adult I went there and sometimes stood between my father
and her during their arguments
It was her words get an education that led me out of the suburbs
into higher education
I was able to escape her fate
I’m writing this now to say despite all of my valiant efforts
I can no longer be my mother’s hero
All of these years even though high femme I always had a sense of bravado
That I could save anyone
It showed up always in my teaching with students
Anyone in a dark place I’d show up in my raft and
toss them a preserver
Only now the enemy is death
I see my mother descending and I cannot
pry open the jaws
A fate where even poetry cannot intervene.