Here Where Coltrane Is

By Michael S. Harper b. 1938

Soul and race

are private dominions,

memories and modal

songs, a tenor blossoming,

which would paint suffering

a clear color but is not in

this Victorian house

without oil in zero degree

weather and a forty-mile-an-hour wind;

it is all a well-knit family:

a love supreme.

Oak leaves pile up on walkway

and steps, catholic as apples

in a special mist of clear white

children who love my children.

I play “Alabama”

on a warped record player

skipping the scratches

on your faces over the fibrous

conical hairs of plastic

under the wooden floors.

Dreaming on a train from New York

to Philly, you hand out six

notes which become an anthem

to our memories of you:

oak, birch, maple,

apple, cocoa, rubber.

For this reason Martin is dead;

for this reason Malcolm is dead;

for this reason Coltrane is dead;

in the eyes of my first son are the browns

of these men and their music.

Michael S. Harper, “Here Where Coltrane Is” from Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Collected Poems. Copyright © 2000 by Michael S. Harper. Used with the permission of the University of Illinois Press.

Source: The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (University of Illinois Press, 1997)

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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