Melba Joyce Boyd

A Poet’s Poet

for Naomi Long Madgett (1923-2020)

Sun streams 
between autumn 
leaves like glittering 
lights on a Christmas 
tree when a crescent 
moon peers between 
gathering clouds
as we call your name
in funeral refrain,
trying to touch 
your spirit
transcending 
this dying place, 
spinning inside 
gravity.

Warm November 
comforts our grief 
as we retrieve 
poetry paths 
melding words 
into art in
the quiet cavern
beneath your 
Tudor cottage
in Detroit’s
Underground,
where books 
emerge star 
by star,
lifting language
above dim 
city nights.

Go greet your muse,
convene with Randall, 
Brooks, Hayden, 
and Clifton.
meet Dunbar, 
Harper, Wheatley,
and commune 
with Langston Hughes.

Anonymous authors 
of Negro Spirituals 
enjoin your light, 
ringing in heavenly
Sundays anticipating 
the Blues knocking 
at the door every, 
mournful Monday,
as halleluiah 
choruses resound 
and your poetry 
merges with
eternal echoes 
of love psalms,
still breathing
inside our 
earthbound 
souls.

— March 30, 2021

Ever Vigilant

for Julius V. Combs, M.D. (August 6, 1931-April 1, 2020)

Beneath Elm trees
sheltering Hazlett Street,
vigilant descendants 
of enslaved wombs,
of steel-bone labor, 
and Christian resistance, 
reimagine existence. 

a child visits 
a physician’s office,
sees a Black man
in a white coat, 
and within a flash, 
envisions his mission:

“I am going 
to be a doctor.”

Julius commits 
to covenants 
as husband, father, 
brother, son, friend,
and physician, 
countering inequities
with a deep belief 
in an oath 
to sustain life,
to realize hope 
for impoverished
patients surviving 
the dark 
parts of cities,
like Detroit’s Westside
where he became,
reflecting on the 
arc of tree limbs,
supplying fresh 
oxygen for lungs
and cool shade for
sizzling summer days 
and the consequences 
of disease that 
destroyed the Elms, 
leaving empty skies and  
abandoned homes
after factory closings 
that wounded neighbor-
hoods, hemorrhaging
like war-torn 
territories.

And yet, 
ever vigilant, 
Julius V. Combs, M.D.
continues to 
protect our flesh, 
to deliver thousands 
of souls at birth, 
resurrecting a legacy
that defies 
a contentious,
still-born planet 
that continues 
to conspire 
to smother 
a child’s first gasp
for breath.

Melba Joyce Boyd, a native Detroiter, is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Wayne State University, and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan.  She is an award-winning author and/or editor of thirteen books, nine of which are her own poetry collection. Death Dance of a Butterfly, received the Library of Michigan Notable Books Award for Poetry, Roses and Revolutions: The Selected Writings of Dudley Randall received the Independent Publishers Gold Award, the Library of Michigan Notable Books Award for Poetry, and was a Finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Poetry and the ForeWord Award for Poetry.  She composed the official poem for the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, which is inscribed in the dedication wall, and she is the poet laureate of the Wright Museum.  Her poetry has been translated into German, Italian and French.  

Boyd has produced documentary films on iconic poets, Dudley Randall and Naomi Long Madgett, and published two biographies: Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper and Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press.

She has several awards for academic, cultural and community service, including, but not limited to the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Achievement Award, and the International Institute of Detroit Service Award.  The National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women’s Association honored her with a Sojourner Truth Meritorious Award.