Aborigines
- AboriginesAtlanta ‘Cotton’ Centennial: September 18, 1995
Delta fails us— even the business class is wrong on protocol, and windows, the new invention, overfeeds and underplays the coming Olympics: Mercedes, the autobahn of prizes, are in mothballs for travelers aid is still boxcars, busrides, ferries on the superhighway of telex, Time-Warner, uploading and downloading facsimiles of change, rapid as legions debriefing in Russian, in American jive of cinema, peasant video.
There is not the plenty of fields; since Palmares options in the buffer zones of the poor are mostly unrecorded, their gumbo, buffets, currencies of Columbian trade and audience to the new Motown, cyberspace, foreign and domestic, the alphabet forsaken, and the word, still sacred in memorized slogans and pamphlets, and the silence of the kitchenette. [End Page 359]
On the internet, the globe rests on a writing tablet, but not in metaphor of the unsaid, and sayable now on satellite:
the only trope to keep us alive in a dreadful time, was thought, and the songlines of the aborigines
who kept coming to the shores as Indians, Inuit surely, who have no written language and so sing acceptance in tones, feedback, as every spirit of the world talks back in the song of the singer.
You must always begin at the salt-lick of citizenship, paid for in the extreme. by events, and civil, in time of war: we are free for the asking, bound together in maps, pure water,
the trope to keep us alive in a dreadful time, was thought,
homeless in this timezone (songlines of these aborigines)
who kept coming to these shores as new indigenes, Inuit surely,
who have no written language but a few sacred documents
and sing true acceptance in tones, feedback as spirit,
process as the world talks back in the song of the singer.
There is elegance in this an invention of Americans [End Page 360]
who must always begin at the salt-lick of citizenship, paid for in the extreme,
and share, by events, sometimes civil, in time of war:
we are free for the asking, such invention, fruit for the tasting
bound together, diagonally, as pure water percolates midstream.
Want has no place at the welcome table; need is the soul-nutrient as food:
a farmers’ marketplace, nutritious highway in the globe.
Michael S. Harper is author of several volumes of poems, including Images of Kin and Healing Song for the Inner Ear. He is I.J. Kapstein Professor of English at Brown University, where he teaches courses in creative writing and literature.
