Tag Archives: ghosts

“Whose Story of Us We Is Told Is Us” – Shane McCrae

Brother is we is each of us we ghosts

Brother of white folks we

don’t never known us brother we

Because we never doesn’t fits

Nowhere we brother

doesn’t fits in bodies

Our bodies we is always walking leaking

like a ghost can’t be a body in one place

But every eyes / Catches and pulls at it

Like every eyes in any

white folks is another

Hole in our bodies

Brother / Is we is never known them close

Up close whose ghosts we brother leaking is

Whose story of us we is told is us is water in a fist

Brother we not the fist

we not the water

we the thirst

“Blue Dementia” – Yusef Komunyakaa

In the days when a man
would hold a swarm of words
inside his belly, nestled
against his spleen, singing.

In the days of night riders
when life tongued a reed
till blues & sorrow song
called out of the deep night:
Another man done gone.
Another man done gone.

In the days when one could lose oneself
all up inside love that way,
& then moan on the bone
till the gods cried out in someone’s sleep.

Today,
already I’ve seen three dark-skinned men
discussing the weather with demons
& angels, gazing up at the clouds
& squinting down into iron grates
along the fast streets of luminous encounters.

I double-check my reflection in plate glass
& wonder, Am I passing another
Lucky Thompson or Marion Brown
cornered by a blue dementia,
another dark-skinned man
who woke up dreaming one morning
& then walked out of himself
dreaming? Did this one dare
to step on a crack in the sidewalk,
to turn a midnight corner & never come back
whole, or did he try to stare down a look
that shoved a blade into his heart?
I mean, I also know something
about night riders & catgut. Yeah,
honey, I know something about talking with ghosts.

Excerpt from Men We Reaped – Jesmyn Ward

From 2000 to 2004, five Black young men I grew up with died, all violently, seemingly unrelated deaths…That’s a brutal list, in its immediacy and it’s relentlessness, and it’s a list that silences people. It silenced me for a long time. To say this is difficult is understatement; telling this story is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But my ghosts were once people, and I cannot forget that.

Men We Reaped: A Memoir by Jesmyn Ward, 2013