A Poem in Celebration of Black History

Russell D. Pierce

Our Arrivals Here

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

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 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

1

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

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

2

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

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.

3

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

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

4

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

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.

5

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, who always wondered when an assembly of ore than two with common hue gathered—was it a revolt, today a posse, stirring up trouble.

6

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

Reginald Lewis

7

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

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.

8

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

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,

9

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

All for my people,

So we hear the poetic thunder of Wheatley,

10

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

Every day to the streets of Ferguson

Every day we give witness to the Lord’s command

11

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

Yes

The choir now stands,

12

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 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

13

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.

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—

14

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 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.

15

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

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

16

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.

Yes

Well

17

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

Oh, what great troubles and trials abound

Here, Africa, Americas, Israel, Egypt, Palestine, China, Russia and on Downing Street

18

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

In a new unison with all, nature and each other

Amen

19