Clan Meeting: Births and Nations: A Blood Song

By Michael S. Harper b. 1938

We reconstruct lives in the intensive

care unit, pieced together in a buffet

dinner: two widows with cancerous breasts

in their balled hands; a 30-year-old man

in a three-month coma

from a Buick and a brick wall;

a woman who bleeds off and on from her gullet;

a prominent socialite, our own nurse,

shrieking for twins, “her bump gone”;

the gallery of veterans, succored,

awake, without valves, some lungs gone.

Splicing the meats with fluids

seasoned on the dressing room

table, she sings “the bump gone”

refrain in this 69-degree oven,

unstuffing her twin yolks

carved from the breast, the dark meat

wrapped in tinfoil and clean newspaper;

the half black registered nurse

hums her six years in an orphanage,

her adopted white family,

breaded and primed in a posse,

rising in clan for their dinner.

We reload our brains as the cameras,

the film overexposed

in the x-ray light,

locked with our double door

light meters: race and sex

spooled and rungs in a hobby;

we take our bundle and go home.

Michael S. Harper, “Clan Meeting: Births and Nations: A Blood Song” from History is Your Own Heartbeat (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1971). Copyright © 1971 by Michael S. Harper. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

Source: History Is Your Own Heartbeat (University of Illinois Press, 1971)

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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