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Grandfather

By Michael S. Harper b. 1938

In 1915 my grandfather’s

neighbors surrounded his house

near the dayline he ran

on the Hudson

in Catskill, NY

and thought they’d burn

his family out

in a movie they’d just seen

and be rid of his kind:

the death of a lone black

family is the Birth

of a Nation,

or so they thought.

His 5’4” waiter gait

quenched the white jacket smile

he’d brought back from watered

polish of my father

on the turning seats,

and he asked his neighbors

up on his thatched porch

for the first blossom of fire

that would bring him down.

They went away, his nation,

spittooning their torched necks

in the shadows of the riverboat

they’d seen, posse decomposing;

and I see him on Sutter

with white bag from your

restaurant, challenged by his first

grandson to a foot-race

he will win in white clothes.

I see him as he buys galoshes

for his railed yard near Mineo’s

metal shop, where roses jump

as the el circles his house

toward Brooklyn, where his rain fell;

and I see cigar smoke in his eyes,

chocolate Madison Square Garden chews

he breaks on his set teeth,

stitched up after cancer,

the great white nation immovable

as his weight wilts

and he is on a porch

that won’t hold my arms,

or the legs of the race run

forwards, or the film

played backwards on his grandson’s eyes.

Michael S. Harper, “Grandfather” from Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Collected Poems. Copyright ©2000 by Michael S. Harper. Reprinted with the permission of the author and the University of Illinois Press.

Source: Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Collected Poems (University of Illinois Press, 2000)

Biography

Acclaimed poet and teacher Michael S. Harper was born in 1938, in Brooklyn, New York. Known his innovative use of jazz rhythms, cultural allusion, historical referent and personal narrative, Harper is “a deeply complex poet whose mission is to unite the fractured, inhumane technologies of our time with the abiding deep well of Negro folk traditions,” said John Callahan in the New Republic. Harper does this, noted Poetry reviewer . . .

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