Angela Jackson
A Tale of a Comet
Neoweiss, July, 2020
Just think –
The comet tonight won’t be here
For another 7,000
Years. How long
Will its tail stand still
In the night sky?
To last a memory
Of a life.
And that any-named boy shot by
Another unremarked boy,
How long will his
Memory hang out
Under the streetlight?
Or the Black woman, lovely and beloved daughter,
In the dark, not much more than a girl, cozy beside her lover,
Shot dead
In her own bed, battering ram
At the door. How long will last the spark in the memory of her?
Or a cuffed Black man
With an intentional knee
On his neck
For nine minutes
While so many people cried out and watched
As if he a comet to appear again
In 7,000 years. Or the next
Day on the evening news.
And what of the rest
Of his flash across a lifetime
As son, brother, husband, father,
Kinsman, moving like a comet, big
In the sight, a life lived
In relativity, getting by, loving
Wherever, whomever he could.
Him, her
Just think
How love follows a person’s life
For
7,000 years
The Professor Considers
The Professor considers his mother
and the long labor that birthed him
and the longer labors that educated
him. He is perpetually astonished
by all she managed to do –
a single mother single because of
a single shot to the heart
of a man on his way home, a laborer
who looked like someone up to no
good in his honest Black skin.
The Professor considers absence,
a hole in the memory of his mother’s
lost laughter meant to birth more.
The Professor considers his own lost
Laughter, a lifetime of hurt buried
In inquiry into the nature of a broken universe.
Angela Jackson is a poet, novelist and playwright. She is a recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Pushcart Prize and an American Book Award for Solo in the Boxcar Third Floor E. And All These Roads Be Luminous: Poems Selected and New was nominated for the National Book Award, Dark Legs and Silk Kisses was awarded the Carl Sandburg Award and the Chicago Sun Times/Friends of Literature Book of the Year for Poetry 1994. It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the Pen/Open Book Award, a finalist for the Milt Kessler Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Award. Her debut novel Where I Must Go received an American Book Award. Its sequel Roads, Where There Are No Roads was awarded the John Gardner Fiction Prize. More Than Meat and Raiment: Poems is forthcoming in 2021.