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.