Content warning:
"Luminaries" by Adebe DeRango-Adem is a highly visual poem. If you are viewing it on a smaller screen width, the text will not form the shapes the poet intended. If you like, you can click on the above thumbnail to view the poem as an image file. You will probably have to click again to enlarge it.
Each to his taste, but as for me,
My Venus shall be ebony…
—Lewis Latimer, African American inventor of the carbon filament for incandescent electric light bulbs (1881)
A glass globe about four inches long, and the shape of a dropping tear…
—“Edison’s Electric Light,” New York Times (1882)
Teacher teacher me
in the front can’t
you see my hand
pray tell
why white
hands keep
grasp -ing
at all
hours
in the
dark
for us
/ why white hands
draw a blank
’bout us keep forgetting
the filaments
brilliant things that made us last
[ no less thanks to us you got your
paper envelope seal
letter box bottle cap
door lock door stop
pencil sharpener blood bank
big banks blood money
& we could go on
[ say
death is light and shadows of flesh darkness is sight 1
say I’ll grow up to study physics for fun & question
genesis
surviving seeing
life from prone the throb of police
lights but I’m done
with this feeling I’m stupid & contagious
a piebald sparrow on a barbed wire
wearing its short-lived freedom thin
[ no matter I lived
the way flesh darkness is sight ’n shit is blues accruing
into a loneliness
of no return
is my having walked
the necessary tightropes poised
by the caul / call of the veil I don’t need but holds me / wears me
out like I need protection at all costs
/ like it should cost
to keep a form in this world
[ when what I need is to wrest
more forms of rest
so I might whorl
keep moving on over do anything but stay put
/ let stasis be a mask
[ what’s a burnt bridge on scorched
earth anyway
the smoke rising
into the names we did not cite / the past
no longer keeps me up at night
/ the future does
I must write to know I lived
1 From Henry Dumas’s “Saba of the Snow and the Sun” (Play Ebony, Play Ivory). [return]