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A Poem in Celebration of Black History

Russell D. Pierce

Our Arrivals Here

Honoring the Legacy of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, jr.

Acknowledgement is given especially to State Senator Chang-Diaz for attending this program and for describing

the narrative poem as epic.

Special thanks also is extended to those invitees who could not make the Program this year including supporters

Mayor Walsh, State Representative Fox and State Representative Carvalho and City Councilor Jackson

A POETIC NARRATIVE PREPARED ESPECIALLY UPON REQUEST AND IN

RECOGNITION OF THE PEER COMMUNITY

Director

Office of Recovery and Empowerment

January 2015

Ancient Kingdoms, Ghana, Songhai, Ethiopia, and Kush, Mali too

A remarkable people, great civilization prior to the America’s captured

we were, stories told by griots of our spirits, the heavens, but the

ground too, before the Greeks, we schooled, abundantly blessed with

resources, copper, zinc, coffee—commerce before shipped to these

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shores, The Middle Passage, rebellion in the Americas, Nat Turner,

Toussaint L’Overture, P.B.S Pinchback, Reconstruction, the War

Between the States, our Christology, our AME, our normal schools, our

redemption, our Tuskegee, our Ben Carlson, our Althea Gibson, our

Cleaver, our Ali, our Phyllis Wheatley, our Hiram Revels, our Judge

Motley and Thurgood Marshall, Higginbotham, our W.E.B. Du Bois, our

explorers, Henson, our singers, Leontyne Price, Ella, our Renaissance,

our Ossie and Ruby Dee

Oh, no Oh, yes

The children have assembled

The old have gathered here

And all the family

The congregants set quietly

Historians would write, John Hope Franklin, intellectuals would

challenge, W.E.B. Du Bois, and orators would sit besides presidents,

Frederick Douglass, and entertainers would create artistry out of

confusion, Josephine Baker

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All this so that we could be recognized for bringing meaning and dignity

to the institutions of American civilization

And not to become as we celebrate this day a negligible factor in the

history of the world, so Carter G. Woodson, believed

In their pews, oh yes The men, kneel

Oh, no The children

mourn

The clouds of our God support such a scene as this.

And yes, strange fruit

Ida B. Well,

Mob,

Protests,

Unrest

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And can’t we get along

Bestowing all manner of glory at the pomp and circumstance

of prayerful supplicants as if service was meant merely to anoint the

saints among us.

Yes Yes

Their souls were lifted by the verses of old field songs, old ditties and

spirituals.

Oh, yes

The hats worn atop coifed heads and long skirts and bejeweled breast

pockets marked the arrival of the usher board, the home and foreign

mission, the Elders, women of the grand masons—the women were a

credit to this institution where all things holy dwelled with it specifically

and in them there was a magnificent and indwelling of the Father, the

Son and the Holy Ghost

Yes Yes

And let the Church say Aman

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Then there was revelation, redemption, the Freedom Riders, the

hatred, the suffering and cries of a still distressed community

There they were too, students, preachers, whites too assembled in the

shock of dogs upon people at the Pettis Bridge, bloody the day was

called and etched in archival memory, yet no mere artifact of the past,

still reflected here

In Watts

In Los Angeles

In Harlem

In Ferguson

Everywhere it seems around the world,

Surmounting apartheid in South Africa; in China at the Square; people

wanting freedom struggle unceasingly for it, risking both life and

treasure

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So we weep, but told not to, for too long, for

surely a Savior shall come; and the day of reckoning will be here; and all

differences reconciled by the mighty hand the Great Councilor.

The Church, the congregants prays for peace, but

Grandmother Ethel stands up for her testimony in the Church of God in

Christ, arms stretched toward the sky, and intones:

“Lord, Oh, Lord, help us in these last and

evil days”

And the congregants say all-knowingly:

“Well, well, well. Aman, Aman”

And the preacher begins with a Word:

“In my Father’s House there are many mansions….

And then I remember as though being awakened again that he really

talking about our ‘freedom’ but as the poet would say in a most indirect

way, not wanting to scare off those outside the group, the ceremony,

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who always wondered when an assembly of ore than two with common

hue gathered—was it a revolt, today a posse, stirring up trouble.

So he was, smiling talking our freedom, our reward in a ‘biblical’ way

And Later we would hear the echo cast into modern parlance:

Freedom Now

The fierce urgency of now

as gradualism is a type of tranquillizing drug, dating back centuries,

expounded by The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, but expressed in texts

older than the Bible itself

But, yes Absalom Jones, Allen, Daddy Grace, stand firm

they would implore, stand before God, they would preach, simply stand

As in for something other than self, dare to live, to live

upright, righteous yes, but stand, stand firm

In business and industry we have excelled.

Banneker

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Reginald Lewis

Madam C.J.Walker

George Washington Carver

Dr. Daniel Hale Williams and Blanche Bruce, too

A people of distinction,

We are.

Words and missional advice to carry on in lands all

over the world, service on earth would be our reward, but a newer

theology served our purpose for today that a servant though we are,

we are more than worth our hire and such was the intent of the servant

woman in witnessing to her white madam

I am more than you hire, Madam

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And let their be much music, rich and high sounding to announce as if

the very coming of the Lord was near—and our stay here at near end.

So let us pray and say in unison at any hint of distress.

Amen.

Jehovah God

Counselor, Most Holy, Sacrifices at altar and state, and yet though

manumitted, still not free—

Tell us why, New Freedom, Old Freedom, Wars to end

all Wars, Underground railroads now underground

economies, Great Migrations, upward North to the Promised

Land.

Push and pull, they say

Redeemer

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Thus are we called here today the suffering and the offerings of the

wounded, on this day we celebrate the establishment of his schools,

great universities and other institutions that marked the history of our

emancipation and the reconstruction of this earth still marred by the

memories not so distant of the cruelest oppression by the hands of

man exercising dominion in the name of the Lord to control all flock,

even though such segregations in voting, housing and employment

bespeak not of the Lord’s House as originally intended, but the

prejudices recalled every day through the remarkable etching of

memory on even the most holy of garments, for nothing can wipe away

such sin, nothing but judgment allows us to think even of joining in

community ever again. Our community and our covenant are with God,

and through Him all things are possible

Yes Reform, Protest, Nat Turner, Vesey

Rebellion, civil unrest too,

Civil disobedience,

Ghandi, King and Messiah, all

She said it was a Christ that taught my soul benighted to understand

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All for my people,

So we hear the poetic thunder of Wheatley,

Brookes, “Let a new earth arise, of men, bold, take hold and control’

Yes

Professing no belief in the righteousness of man, we are careful in

extolling our own virtue, only to say that such long, long suffering is

both unearned and rectified through grace.

So it has been with our faith—a belief in the reality of redemption

unseen as is the power of the Lord in community, unseen, but known

by those who surrender, surrender all and believe

And so sings, Lena Horne, believe

We are marching every day to Zion

Every day to Mount Olive

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Every day to the streets of Ferguson

Every day we give witness to the Lord’s command

To give refuge to the sick

Clothing to the naked

And rest to the afflicted, the infirm and the old

Through our legitimate labor we are heaven bound—though not

averting eyes to troubles here.

Roll, Jordan, Roll

Rivers I have Walked

Amen

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Yes

The choir now stands,

Straight

Poised

Arms stretched outward, heads turned upward in stylish silk

Push, Pull, Strive, Strive, Recovery I now know

And the choir sings

And the minister then delivers the Word

After the Invocation

During service and before the Benediction

There is a type of order, a ranking between the deacon, deaconesses,

the other worthies, the elder church mother, the trustee board and the

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remainder, members, visitors and guests—mainly those who are in fact

the unchurched, the uncommitted in virtue before other witnesses.

And let this be a lesson to you.

But there is room aplenty

In my Father’s House there are many mansions

And there one day I shall live.

But today, before the celebration of my homecoming and transitioning

from under,

I toil,

So I toil,

A servant worthy only of his hire

So speaks the modern world abashed in abundance, material

prosperity.

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Soulfully adrift—those who would protect their wealth against those

who would protect their sense of honor as the duty to do justice and

practice love with one another; those who treat these commands of

the sovereign as nothing more than stylish, almost archaic reminders of

a mere promise—

So how we devalue the Nature, the Creator within us--

Pestilence and disease, foretold, yes, by the

saints and prophets and disciples of old,

Warned we were by elders, statesmen, but oh,

how modern we have become with income, wealth and extravagance

beyond need,

And now, to the Great Virgin Mary, we weep, but

she hears us not, accountable now to only what we have invested, our

hollow selves.

So modern in thinking and so common in greater

virtue by critiquing those who embrace them, bullying young and old as

outdated, out-of-step with trending in fashion, design, selling and

commerce, pulling us further and apart so much so that people cluster

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among their ‘own kind’ calling it affinity, rather than the exclusiveness

it is cloaked in associational preference, choice.

I repeat, pestilence and disease of all kinds, of

heart, mind, soul, spirit.

HIV

The despoiling of Nature—the air, the streams,

the roadways, all polluted and environmental racism, too.

Such fools we are as we seemingly and

hubristically march toward another Armageddon

Thus here now the celebration of a history, that promises so much in its

Charters and Founding Principles, yet that too is marred by the reality

of lawlessness in our own time, by profit over human need and the

extension of both power and arrogance as ladders of arrival and self-

improvement that both the young and old aspire.to.

And yes He walked out onto space and was

lonely and made a world, but now, but now

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All this without attending to beauty that really purifies our souls and

steadies our hunger for more than what necessity would allow. For this

we are hollow—hollow men and women.

Yes

Well

Amen.

To pursue this course of spiritual praise and call it practice through a re-

tooling of Scripture is worse than fire water that has destroyed people

around the world, an act of perversion that distorts the original design

Natives peoples suddenly dicoered

Yes

Yes.

I celebrate history, this day, as it was intended to be celebrated as a

reflection on our past, by doing so, we advance our truth thrust upon

the world, as if to say I am here, was here, will remain here.

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Yes

Well

And that I will not become a negligible factor in the history of the

world.

To all who are gathered, the august, the poor among us, the leaders

and the holy ones too—

Let us pray as we are able

And let us celebrate here the day the Lord has made and awaken our

sense of gratitude for the bestowing of another day to make a

difference—and maybe even wear that Crown, suggesting in the battle

of life, we have sufficiently overcome, but the soul is not yet satisfied—

rested.

Oh, let souls arise

To, Thee, arise

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Oh, what great troubles and trials abound

Here, Africa, Americas, Israel, Egypt,

Palestine, China, Russia and on Downing Street

What relief it will be

When He says as though judgment is near

that, as grandma said:

Enough is enough, and too much is too

much, even for the well-adjusted, the well-heeled and those of us who

are just striving to get through.

Oh Holy divine,

Push, Pull. Carry, Climb

Others, Sisters, Brothers, the world over,

Stand, in recovery too

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In a new unison with all, nature and each other

Amen