Poem of the Week: Old Lem

OLD LEM 

Sterling Brown

 

I talked to old Lem

and old Lem said:

          “They weigh the cotton

          They store the corn

                We only good enough

                To work the rows;

          They run the commissary

          They keep the books

                We gotta be grateful

                For being cheated;

          Whippersnapper clerks

          Call us out of our name

                We got to say mister

                To spindling boys

          They make our figgers

          Turn somersets

          We buck in the middle

                Say, “Thankyuh, sah.”

                They don’t come by ones

                They don’t come by twos

                But they come by tens.

          “They got the judges

          They got the lawyers

          They got the jury-rolls

          They got the law

                They don’t come by ones

          They got the sheriffs

          They got the deputies

                       They don’t come by twos

          They got the shotguns

          They got the rope

                We git the justice

                In the end

                       And they come by tens.

          “Their fists stay closed

          Their eyes look straight

                Our hands stay open

                Our eyes must fall

                       They don’t come by ones

          They got the manhood

          They got the courage

                       They don’t come by twos

                We got to slink around

                Hangtailed hounds.

          They burn us when we dogs

          They burn us when we men

                       They come by tens . . .

          “I had a buddy

          Six foot of man

          Muscled up perfect

          Game to the heart

                       They don’t come by ones

          Outworked and outfought

          Any man or two men

                       They don’t come by twos

          He spoke out of turn

          At the commissary

          They gave him a day

          To git out the county

          He didn’t take it.

          He said ‘Come and get me.’

          They came and got him

                       And they came by tens.

          He stayed in the county—

          He lays there dead.

                       They don’t come by ones

                       They don’t come by twos

                       But they come by tens.”

    [I chose this relatively well-known poem by Sterling Brown as a followup to last week's "Dead Man Blues" by Lucy Smith. It, too, is a grim and pessimistic look at how the oppression of the Black Nation was maintained in the days before the Civil Rights Movement, and at the double-barreled use of the state and vigilante terror.]

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PotW: Dead Man Blues

DEAD MAN BLUES

by Lucy Smith

Down in the lonesome death cell
A black man sits and sings.
The key he sings is minor
For Sorrow plucks the strings.

       Wish I had died in my cradle, 
       Wish I had never been born;
       For I'm to hang in the morning,
       Hung in the cold, grey morn.

       Here in the valley of the shadow
       From death there's no escape
       I was the nearest black man
       When that white gal hollered rape

Down in the lonesome death cell
He sits and stares at his shoes.
Sorrow plucks the guitar strings
As he sings the Dead Man Blues.

from:

No Middle Ground

(Philadelphia, 1952)

[This reminds me of the work of the great Sterling Brown, "Break Of Day," say.
Seems grim? This is why the Civil Rights Movement erupted.]

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PotW: What Kind of War?

WHAT KIND OF WAR?

by Larry Rottman

Ask what kind of war it is
where you can be pinned down
all day in a muddy rice paddy
while your buddies are being shot
and a close-support Phantom jet
who has been napalming the enemy
wraps itself around a tree and explodes
and you cheer inside?

from:

Winning Hearts and Minds:

War Poems by Vietnam Veterans

(Brooklyn, NY, 1972)

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PotM: In the great snowfall before the bomb

In the great snowfall before the bomb

by Lorine Niedecker

In the great snowfall before the bomb
colored yule tree lights
windows, the only glow for contemplation
along this road

 I worked the print shop
right down among em
the folk from whom all poetry flows
and dreadfully much else.

 I was Blondie
I carried my bundles of hog feeder price lists
down by Larry the Lug,
I'd never get anywhere
because I'd never had suction,
pull, you know, favor, drag,
well-oiled protection.

I heard their rehashed radio barbs—
more barbarous among hirelings
as higher-ups grow more corrupt.
But what vitality! The women hold jobs—
clean house, cook, raise children,
bowl and go to church.

What would they say if they knew
I sit for two months on six lines
of poetry?

[This is the poem that made me a Lorine Niedecker fan. She was an Objectivist poet (NOT the Ayn Rand bullshit, but a Reddish school of Modernist poetry which fell into obscurity during the McCarthy era) who lived and worked in rural Wisconsin. 

An article by Elizabeth Willis is a good introduction to her, but there's a lot more on the Internet about her life and her poetry. (Some of the articles mention that she worked for Hoard's Dairyman, which she refers to in this poem, but few of those commenting seem to understand the central role this weekly publication played for North American dairy farmers throughout the 20th century.)

It's a short poem, but a rich one, touching on the Bomb, the lives of working people--including the work itself, women's role in society and the weird distance the lone artist must feel in larger communities.]

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