Jamail Center for Legal Research
Tarlton Law Library

Roots

The memories of my fathers
Whisper in my ears
    as the images
Of days gone before I was born
Unfold in stories told
    by my grandmother.
Songs sung on the back porch
    in the evening sun
"Laud I'm gonna
    lay dis burdin down
    lay dis burdin down
"Woke up dis
    mornin' wid
        Jesus
        on my min'
"Oh, yes, laud Jesus on my min'"
All on the back porch somewhere
    in the summer
When I was small

Didn't We . . .
A Blues of Remembrance

          I.
Didn't we make the trees
     bend together
When I drew you to me
     and made our hut
          by the river
When the morning was
     fresh with bird song
          and forest light
And the tall grass of the
     savanna
Wove its sweet scent
     into our home
Didn't we make the trees
     bend together
When the sea's song was
     our dirge in the
          silent hole of
               the sailing coffins

          II.
Didn't we bend together
     in the cotton fields
     in one room shacks
And sorrow's song became
the love of Jesus
And Freedom was always
     a dream
Didn't we bend together
When the night riders came
And the tobacco harvest
     wasn't enough
When the bow weevil came
     and the cotton crop
     failed
And the wash you took in barely saw us through
And there wasn't enough
     for love
          or us.

         III.
Didn't we bend together
When signs marked the edge
     of the delta land
And our sons hung from
     the trees
When our bodies bent to
     tend the land
          we shared
And the crop was never ours
When figures turned and
     another year of
          planting was gone
Didn't we bend together
     through the wars
And the tales of freedom
     the young ones told
          of life up North
          and in Europe

          IV.
Didn't we make the trees
          bend together
When you drew me to you
          and sheltered me
          in your arms
When time turned tail
          on end
And the young ones sat in
          and the old songs
          had new meaning
When cities burned and
          Freedom's song
Was heard in every hollow
Didn't we make the trees
          bend together
Didn't we. . . .
               just
                    the
                         two
                              of
                                   us.

Anyanayaa -- A Season In Sorrow

You came to me
        in a season in sorrow

When I carried you
        in me and your heart beat
        pulsed with my blood

When the rains came
        and my tears were
            my comfort

When the leaves grew
        bright with fall's
            faint touch

And love danced upon
        winter's breath

You came; eyes bright with questions
        a mind filled with wonder
            and a will and joy
                for life as
            strong as mine

You came in a season of sorrow
            when only I could
                greet you

And only love could make you
            sing in the shelter

                of my arms

Southern Road

-- for Sterling Brown,
    blues poet

Of the red dust and
        winding trails

That lead to barren fields
        and empty Plantation houses

The soil echoes with
        blues chords
            and work songs

Spirituals sung on
        Sunday morning

African lullabies in the
        evening shadows

A red clay drenched
        with tears

And blood remembers

As an old woman sings
        to her grandchild

The loneliness and pain
        etched in the tenor
            of her voice

Rising into the blackness
        of a southern night.

Heritage

-- for Leon Damas who drank
    from the waters of his people

I am this country
    singing my spirituals

            into the southland

Speaking in the shadows
        of the years
            spent under the
                poison tree

Moving closer to the land
        sinking my naked roots
                into the fertile foreign
                    soil

I am the wind
    weeping through my life

The blues of living close to
        the bitterness of the
                long naked years

I am the rivers flowing onward
    my song renewed by
        fresh springs

Moving nearer and nearer
        to my source

Jail

There's no tenderness
    in this brutal system
        of things

Debased by the violence
    of life gone wrong
        since birth

With exclusion's specter
    standing at
        every door.

The fearful evenings
    of victims
        and night riders

The fiery dawns
    of resistence
        and revenge

A simple question
    of privileges
        and values

Of injustices
    and death

With no exit
    but revolt.

Heroes

Sometimes I sit up at night
Listening to myself cry
My sobs for those we lost
In the battle with the beast,
And thoughts flash my mind
Realizing that I am somewhere between battles
Counting those we lost:
          Rap five years in the internal concentration camps,
          Cleve five years in the belly of the beast,
          Dan Massey paralyzed by a racist cop's shot
              gun blast in the back in Nashville,
          Malcolm by an assassin's bullet
          Martin the same
Places come back like shadow figures upon a darkened
          stage and bodies lie strewn there
          soaking the ground red with their blood;
          Orangeburg, Jackson, Memphis,
              New York, Nashville
The funeral pyres breathe forth their stench
And I sit lost myself weeping inwardly
Riding somewhere in my mind with Eldridge Cleaver
Through the streets of Nashville on an April night
During a riot

Markings

-- In Memory of Ms. Vashti Cook

Run through by the gun wounds
    of the day
Shot down when we carried
    T.V. sets in to the night
As the slow math of waiting
    that quite rheumatism
        of thought
        prevails

While the whine of what was
    my life has become
        a scream.

Resting Place

In this place summers from me
In this place where Spring has
    no song
Winter's moon hangs crescent
    in the tree branches
Summer's night, like fog
    holds memories
        in shopping bags
And childhood dances in
    the hallway outside
        my door
Somewhere a clock is ticking
    ticking
Minutes that stretch into days
But only I remember
When your song and
        the rhythm of
            the bed springs
Made cricket sounds in the
        night
And our loving was like water
        lapping against
            the shore
Your voice--a melody in my mind
That sang in the kitchen over
    bacon and eggs
And Handel's Messiah rose
        to the rhythmic tapping
            of the dishwater
Somewhere you are dancing
        on tiptoes bare foot
            in the night fog
Winter's away from me
Falls away from me
In this place where
        summer carries
            memories in
                shopping bags
And Spring has no song.

Sojourner

-- A memorial for Leon Damas

                II.
Now in this time of sorrow
        in this time,
            in this world
I have traveled a little ways
        with you,
            knew you,
                loved you
Eyebrows arched, your voice
        pot-marked with the
        accent of a different
                land
The quality of hurt and sorrow
        traversed through
            Years of work to

                     preserve a people's
                     Culture
To you life had not been
        a fair exchange
Their clothes, their speech
        their manners, their hopes
            their music
                their art
In exchange for being the
        child of a former slave
        and a "Citizen of France"

                III.
But what of it now
    when death finds us
        On every corner
You sang with Sanghor
    Rabiminjara, and Caesar
Who played the banjo not
    Not the guitar
The strings and tom-toms
    of your heart are
        Silenced
Only the melody will be left
    of a torch bearer
Who told us we looked
    ridiculous in
     their shoes,
      their pants,
        their coats,
         their shirts,
          their top hats
Who remembered a world
    where bare feet
        and brown earth
Touched and danced
    before they came

                IV.
It is at the end of the morning
    I will look for you
At the edge of this
    world I will hear

        you singing in the
            cane break
Coming home, at the end
    Of the day
And we will dance together
    embrace as brothers
        brown feet on
            brown earth
Spirits of red clay and
    tin shacks rise
        On barren rock
Ancient ones will greet us
        and
Welcome home the Deputy
        the lover
        the poet
        the Guiana-man

                V.
Tell me now Obiaman, what do
    I tell my children
How do I explain
That you wrote poems and
    made promises
And now Shango has received
    your soul
        and Demballa
            has his son again
I hearing you singing in the fields
Your voice a murmuring on the
    warm island winds
I see you sitting at the end of the day
Reedy, thin, laughing,
    telling tales to brown
            children

Life Line

The lines of our lives
     are written
         on our palms

A twisted hand on old
         shopping bags
         waiting for
             the morning bus

The wrinkled prints of old
         fingers that
             cleaned and sewed
             wash and scrubbed
             to give another
                 leisure

Old lines, old lives
A generation of labor
         to nourish
             hungry mouths
             and tired bodies

Hungry mouths and old hope
         Old lines, old lives
             merging with the present

In calloused puzzles
         on weathered hands

Bent bones and scarred flesh

That build ships, picked cotton,
             broke rock, laid rails

Sewed and harvested in
             homes and fields

Old lives, old lines
             written in the palms
                 of our hands.

Rain

And the rain beats down
    upon the earth
        and the windows
Like notes from Segovia's guitar
Pronouncing in
    Staccato-like phrases
Remembrances of loneliness
Like Miles lost somewhere
    in a Universe of sound
Listing through a muted horn.

Solitude

Sometimes I sit smoking
And Segovia's guitar pronounces
In staccato like phrases
James Brown, Otis Redding
Remembrances of sorrow
As the southern landscape
Bows her head beneath the setting sun

Time

Sometimes when I am
   alone
I sit listening
   to the sound
Of time walking
   On Panther's paws
Through a silent night

Karl Carter was born in New Orleans in 1944, and moved with his family to Los Angeles when he was in third grade. He remained in California until he went to Nashville, Tennessee to attend Tennessee State University where he began writing poetry and was awarded his B.S. degree in sociology. Carter then attended Howard University where he obtained his law degree. He practices law in Washington, D.C. and resides in Alexandria, Virginia.
Carter authored two chapbooks in the early 1970s, A Season in Sorrow and Three Poems, both published by Broadside Press in Detroit.
"Markings" was published in Presence African in 1970. "Southern Road" was published in Black World in a special edition dedicated to Sterling Brown. "Roots" and "Heroes" were first published in Stephen Henderson (ed.), Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References (William Morrow & Co., 1973).