from OXYGEN II (Moonstone Press, 2022).
The Painter
You sat with brushes in hand and the light flowing above and below,
the prayer like paper, the light illumined all our sacred trees.
Somehow, we forgot all our raucous and joyous past loves
when I asked you to listen for the screen door’s slam
and the call to supper as I brought you the evening meal.
And then there was that folio of your recent sketches:
so many similar dark faces filled with joy.
I gazed at the rich, brown texture of a watercolor on the page,
a man’s tortured face, his beared, his glowing tough bronzed skin.
You said it was a portrait of your brother,
who died overseas during a rain of fire in the Viet Nam war.
And you put down your brushes to confess
we were going to start life all over again
without waging the private wars that keep us together.
You painted your dead brother’s face
against a background of blue.
Collage
after Romare Bearden
Gather out of star-dust:
memories of tender Harlem evenings where portraits filled
my young mind with jazz. And we stayed awake late nights
in our rented place on West 131st Street laughing and talking
the talk. DuBois, Hughes, Ellington. The gatherings
when I heard their stories, the abstract truth, scientific in grandeur
yet ever so real, down to earth, stories of Time and then,
the soothsayers, the truthsayers, singing their jogo blues.
Silence willfully broken. Scrapbooks of faded brown photographs,
clippings from Ebony and Jet. Folks dancing the original Charleston,
the fine old step, the swing and the sway.
Gather out of moon-dust:
There was crisis and opportunity. Black new voices, new forms.
Voices of folk singing real soft and mellow.
Lessons on how to become a “real poet,” while Claude McKay
joined the Russian Communist Party. Fire from flint.
Letters were penned by Countee Cullen to Langston Hughes.
Shadows reigned over the evening skies of Harlem.
Gather out of sky-dust:
a time for the “new negro,”
For Pullman porters to unionize
and for Josephine Baker, chanteuse extraordinaire, to exercise
her wings of gossamer silk and satin.
Music warbled from an ebony flute
while poor folk sold their fine clothes to the Jews.
Was Christ Black?
Do angels really play trombones for God
in a black/brown heaven?
Gather out of song-dust:
Did we owe it all to Spingarn, Knopf, or Van Vechten?
Or was originality and improvisation our sacred creed?
As I gazed from the window at the skies
of my fading youth, all I could see was fire.
I wanted to hear the Blackbirds Orchestra wild on a Saturday night.
To hear “Go Down Moses” sung in church on a Sunday morn.
Wanted a style of my own.
To become Emperor Jones.
Daddy Grace.
Beth Brown Preston is a poet and novelist with two collections of poetry from the Broadside Lotus Press and two chapbooks, including OXYGEN II (Moonstone Press, 2022). She is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Writing Program at Goddard College. She has been a CBS Fellow in Writing at the University of Pennsylvania; and a Bread Loaf Scholar. Her work has been recognized by the Hudson Valley Writers Center, the Sarah Lawrence Writing Institute, The Writer’s Center, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and by A Public Space. She has written a debut novel — CIRCE’S DAUGHTERS — a work of historical literary fiction. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous literary and scholarly journals.
