Messages as Translation
- Messages as Translation
“Justice Shallow, I owe you a thousand pounds.”
—Shakespeare
With all of Sterling’s poems in Spanish the committee waits for defense; you cannot go before them with your hands empty so go before them full of the saga of St. Elizabeths when a chaplain went into his room
and introduced herself as a student of Housman asking him to sign her book she had studied as a freshwoman at Brown University; was he that Brown?
The Asiento, the church’s covenant with the mercenaries to imprison the tribes of the New World, all that the Alhambra failed to do: 1492: to raise up the barbarians into the aesthetics of design, the garden of the self in the glaze and patina of black men and women
who could build the Taj Mahal with their own version of bricks: Douglass Hall, Sterling Nelson Brown Hall, Arthur Paul Davis Hall, Daisy Turnbull Brown Hall: the planet marble; the planet Styx. [End Page 911]
Falstaff, your pass protection is the arc of St. Michael’s “straight, no chaser” sword; crooked is the speech of the inquisitors, for they must have their music.
The Slim Greer of the elements, all the forces of humor and travail on the open road, is now in Douglass Hall, and in the Founder’s Library, as in the study of the glass books; there is no postal box on Fort Totten; Kearny Street is still the poet laureate’s house:
even in Spanish Cervantes holds the Inquisition at bay (the Spanish Armada, 1588), defeats in terza rima, so that each child would understand it, women applaud it, men remember it:
so present Southern Road as your hymnal on the long walk to the presidents of Howard; “there’s no hiding place down here.”
Michael S. Harper is University Professor and Professor of English at Brown University, where he has taught since 1970. He is the first Poet Laureate of the State of Rhode Island, a post he held from 1988 to 1993. This prize-winning poet is author of ten books of poems, including History Is Your Own Heartbeat, Song: I Want a Witness, Debridement, Nightmare Begins Responsibility, Healing Song for the Inner Ear, and Honorable Amendments. In 1970 and 1977, his poetry collections, Dear John, Dear Coltrane and Images of Kin were nominated, respectively, for the National Book Award. In 1979 selected and edited The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown for the National Poetry Series.
