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  • The Procession
  • Yusef Komunyakaa (bio)

Yes, the dust of the Great Migration is in our dreams & on the soles of our feet, but we can foxtrot into this bandaged season limping toward us from the fog. Each question uncurls a little whip in the air. Can we change tomorrow? Can we love what’s in the deep mirror & trace fault lines beneath nocturnal streets? Loneliness & anger always know the road home. Now the long-lost ones stand at the threshold & gaze into our eyes. Please don’t turn away, don’t retreat into caves of artificial light & borrowed lowly laughter brimming up. There’s a hard, long road ahead. Nights & days ahead, one foot in front of the other.

Days ahead, one foot in front of the other is how we ascend Jacob’s tangled ladder. Bring your lantern & philosopher’s stone, your pick & shovel, ball of twine, hook & sinker, your slide ruler & plumb bob. There’s some faithful work to be done on this hill & down in the valley, too. Bring your running shoes & baseball cap. I tell you, I’m no one’s Benjamin Banneker, but I know a cul-de-sac is a whiplash & slipknot. Sometimes you have to bow to self-given thorns, or weave around a body of water. Some things you argue against or for, & then you go straight through bedrock.

You have to go straight through bedrock to find hope, I said. You can’t kill the past to erase a page. Cut out a tongue singing delta, & still a windy lamentation crests the hilltop. Burn odes into ash to smear on the forehead, [End Page 376] but still the laconic cricket calls the night to sing deeds, blasphemies, & allegories droning beneath the earth’s blueprint. Yes, even if we parade in secondhand garb as priestly nobodies, the Daylight Boys, or other heretical truth-seekers, we know weeping isn’t a fly in a spider’s web. If you can’t see hunger on our streets, at least remember hard songs left behind.

At least remember hard songs left behind on fields from Concord to the Green Zone. Our maps go to the edge of a lost frontier, following every unsolved riddle & tributary, indigenous souls still in the drizzle & bog grass, behind hedgerows—beyond imagination. Now there’s one sky, with holes in the ozone. Limitless steps across snow recast star charts. All the old gods gaze at us like deathwatch beetles, waiting to see what we do with this hour. Let Walt Whitman put his lips to your ear as he rocks the dead of north & south in his arms. Words taproot down to what we are made of, & these hosannas are ours to surrender to.

These hosannas are ours to surrender to till laurel & olive branch into our footpath, an eruption of blooms overtaking our heads. We’re here to honor those who came before, who gladly or sadly gave themselves back to earth. You know their names. We know who stood & never lost ground. We know who knelt beside their contraband drums & depended on hawthorn to guard them. Sunlight & water draw roots deep as seed & oath; their sway & pull can bend an oak over a grand monument. Evermore pours from a beggar’s tin cup as one thousand clocks strike inside the stone base.

Clocks strike inside the stone base. The mainsprings are about to be adjusted & oiled. For the first time in decades the blindfold has slipped off her face, & we are now seeing her true reflection [End Page 377] on the harbor. The shortcuts tell us, no, the winding road isn’t a second guess, & one could risk one’s life getting here. Where I stand in splendor, at this point of view, surely, it is already Springtime. How could it not be? The Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes, the bright hats cocked at the true angle that slays blue devils. How could it not be? This is the hour.

How could it not be? This is the hour beckoning the North Star & drinking gourd, waist-deep shadows crossing the Ohio River, & I hear Fredrick Douglass’ voice in a brisk shiver of dry leaves, saying, “When the dogs...

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