Each month, the San Francisco Public Library Web site, www.sfpl.org, will feature selected poems reflecting the theme of War and Peace on Our Streets.
To submit a poem or for more information about the project, see our News Release.
Also see: Past Featured Poets
September Web Poems
September Featured Poet: Reginald Lockett
Reginald Lockett is the author of The Party Crashers of Paradise (2001), Where the Birds Sing Bass (1995), which won a PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award in 1996,
and Good Times & No Bread (1978). His poetry, articles, and reviews have been published in over fifty anthologies, periodicals, and textbooks. Random History Lessons, his fourth book of poetry,
will be published by Creative Arts Books in Fall, 2003. He has performed his work in Illinois, St. Louis, Arizona, Nevada, Paris, and throughout California. He has taught composition, reading,
literature, and creative writing at San Francisco State University, City College of San Francisco, Laney College, and College of Marin as well as other institutions. He presently teaches at
San Jose City College, performs with the WordWind Chorus, and lives in Oakland.
Currently, Reginald Lockett is reading and recommends:
- Midnight Lightening: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience, by Greg Tate (Prose)
- Panoramas, Victor Hernandez Cruz
- The Sounds of Dreams Remembered, by Al Young
- Rice, by Nikky Finney
- Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smugglerby Juan Felipe Herrera
- Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness, by Bob Kaufman
- Leaf of Life, by Opal Palmer Adisa
- Magic City, by Yusef Kommunyakaa
The Movement
by Reginald Lockett
Things weren't always like this.
We were circuit riders of Garvey's whirlwind,
working the rhythms of blues drenched streets,
jazz soaked nightclubs and gatherings
of houngans and necromancers committed to struggle,
breathing the fire of Malcolm's words.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Way was Grove Street,
and no children stood on comers
speaking the language of doom and hawking
the wares of self-doubt and destruction.
Fillmore was alive with the comings, goings, and doings
of a people dancing
across collard green floors and holding up combread walls
under buttermilk skies,
pawing, clawing, dreaming, scheming, screaming . . .
getting up, standing up, and flying, dying, crying,
conniving their way towards newer tomorrows.
Good brothers and sisters on the speedboat
of revolution, our sights set on this thing
called freedom.
Things weren't always dismal and dank like this.
We were cosmic griots taking the point,
searching infinite perimeters of sights and sounds
from the funky Four Comers of existence,
talking smack by the boatloads and getting one up
on the would-be grafters of our dreams,
slipping and sliding through concrete bayous
in urban undergrowth,
the bloodhounds of oppression, repression,
and suppression
snapping and baying at the iridescence of our heels.
Some of us drank gallons and gallons of Red Mountain
or shortneck after shortneck of Ripple
under the harsh glow of red and blue party lights,
and held tight to women blacker than forty midnights,
suddenly beautiful,
getting the R-E-S-P-E-C-T and do rightness
Aretha demanded in that brand new bag
James Brown shouted and hollered into our thoughts.
Things weren't always crazy like this.
Incarcerated in the desolate barnyards ofAmerikkka,
we were fast and slick in the way we saw ourselves.
We were cutesy tootsie roosters wearing our crowns
a good fifty degrees to the side,
and laid, sprayed, and ready to get paid
in plumage of silk and satin.
We kept the hawks of our misery confused and perplexed
beyond cocaine and cognac tainted perspectives.
We were keepers of the eagle's eye view
on the watch out for the cutthroats of reason
and the backstabbers of sanity
on these long, winding and twisting highways and byways,
booking midnight flights of fancy
on the music of Trane, Albert, and Pharoah,
the teachings of Fanon, Mao, Che, and Huey,
and the muses of Baraka, Sonia, Askia and Larry,
trying to get back home to Ditty-Wah-Ditty*
in a nick of time to call winners
and cash in all the chips
in this game of chance called life.
Reginald Lockett
*Black Folks' Heaven
