The Creators of Now!

Black Heroes Revisited

i. if not us, who?

“Ain’t even much a matter what happens tomorrow, ’cause we men, ain’t we?” — Trip (from the movie Glory, as portrayed by Denzel Washington)

There Is no time To fake, front Or ride the fence, when It comes to doing the right thing. Born in the margins of the melting pot, I’m made real

By The Ideal That we are Begotten by God — To rise up…and be free! Once we Counted only as Three-fifths a Human And All

The World’s Wealth can’t Compensate For the vestiges Of the peculiar institution That ended one-hundred fifty years ago. And it

Would Seem As though Old Jim Crow And hate that hate made Never left Instead Just Stayed.

Manifest Destiny is now:

Time To Take back Our future As the descendants Of those black heroes surviving The Middle Passage. Time to rise And shine on frontlines

Of A New day For the sake Of Medgar, Malcolm, Martin and the sea of unsung Martyrs who perished And perchance To dream For Whom

The bells toll over and again.

ii. liberating the language of legacy

“Long live the black rose that grew from concrete when no one else even cared.” — Tupac Shakur

All ebony and saxish Like the bouquet Of black roses called the cosmos

The shimmery shadow Of my wandering spiritsong Sprouts

From shrouds of traveling souls Battered and tattered and left behind To be pieced back together By epitaphs of our talking paths Through eternal moments Giving sound to silence, and life To everything, even the excerpts

Undefined by time But improvised In music of our minds. Long live The Black Rose As it grows Beneath the blacklight (and its Ultraviolet

Scope of hope) with wisdom To understand the gravity That draws us back — even When we are forced apart. We are one blood, Humanity —

Why can’t hue see? Ain’t it ‘bout Time we take Heed Of our own History. Time To unlearn the lies And revive our legacy.

iii. for His eye is on the sparrow…

If Only the random Rants Of our candidly

Disillusioned minds Could pry the eyes of a world Consuming itself

Still: so much hatred, War and poverty. Police Taking innocent lives

Without a regret Committing acts of Black Genocide as though

We are not suppose To react. But, silence is The betrayal that gives Consent to violence — Silence is a sin that makes Cowards of men And women and their children. Because — now is the time, when

We should be shoutin’: Pharaoh, let my people go! Let my people go! “For His eye is on the sparrow”* And the truth we already know.

Time flies, yet all that Changes is our beloved Heroes, more than just Ashes to dust, more Than just dirt to be

Swept under the rug Or put back into the ground. We are soul children: The future light of the world The all in all, speaking love

Into existence…this We need to heed and believe Until it‘s written Within, on the mystic walls Of our own innervisions.

*The quote is from the gospel hymn written Civilia D. Martin in 1905.

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2021 Michael Hall is a poet and a creative, who is the creator and curator of The Bazaar of the Bizarre and a submissions editor for The POM, living in Illinois, also writing in association with the Writes of Passage, “forged on the wordwrights’ anvil,” and Lingua: Ex Libris Life, because as Albert Camus said, “to create is to live twice.”