Defying Raging Night
Darkness stretches out in this new moon forest
like highway pitch. Still I hear mockingbird.
I’ve walked worn wooded paths through tangling
bushes on such nights, hurried home on snaking dirt
roads, in ancient cypress swamps, overarching
oaks hiding the twinkling stars in a purple sky.
When I was a boy insect sounds did not break
my faith. I’ve walked too red hills of Bukavu
and knelt by the glassy waters of Lake
Kivu,
spoke with the god of rivers, crying
out ties as solemn as oaths on holy books.
At the Grand Marché, I saw a man his torso
on a board roll himself along with padded hands.
On the plains of Goma where I once relieved
myself, where later men, women and children
sought refuge from tribal rage and bloodlust
seeking machetes, I was Kongo. A survivor
of that nightmare passage with strange tongues,
the spirit-killing crammed sadness of iron chains.
I’ve known the blackness of life yet I’m still
fool enough to sound out a Mockingbird spring.
Reading a
Poem by Rudolph Lewis at Winter Solstice
Good
readings are sometimes governed by iconoclasm, the smashing of established
gestures of decoding. A reader just
walks out of the prison built by guardians of culture; she or he discards
mindcuffs and explores; he or she discovers the wilderness is more intellectual
than the glacial chambers in palaces of wisdom, the prisons of correctness. Despite probable errors of misreading, the
reader’s sense of being independent is rewarding.
When
I first read the typescript of Rudolph Lewis’s Mockingbirds at Jerusalem, I felt that I was discovering traces of
unbridled creativity. The most important
features of his craft and craftsmanship were derived from paying more attention
to life rhythms than to treatises on prosody and monographs on how to write a
poem. The bane of much contemporary
poetry is disingenuous professionalism. What does it profit a poet to achieve
technical brilliance without fire? Lewis
has mastered fire and artistry.
After
reading the published version of Mockingbirds
at Jerusalem (Pikesville,
MD: Black Academy Press, 2014), I
have rediscovered “Defying Raging Night,” one of several touchstones in the
book. Lewis has the discipline needed to
write such fresh, engaging villanelles as “The Thrill Is Gone: A Blues
Villanelle” and “Get Up Dead Man: Blues Villanelle #2.” I am attracted more, however, his playing a
riff on the formality of the villanelle by invoking the blues in “Defying
Raging Night.” The poem is a defiant
tribute to Dylan Thomas’s masterpiece “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,”
a tribute that confirms the rightness of Thomas’s general imperatives to resist
the inevitable by displacing them with specific, burning recognitions from
African American blues ethos. Thomas inspires.
Lewis empowers. Lewis demonstrates that
fixed poetic structures can be unfixed to one’s advantage.
Lewis’s
achievement in this poem depends on cultural literacy, a reader’s ability to
grasp allusions: “in ancient cypress swamps” ---James Weldon Johnson; “ringing
insect sounds affirmed” ---Richard Wright; “I’ve known black wonders”---Langston
Hughes. Place names evoke knowledge of African geography and scenes of ethnic
language creation as well as genocide—Bukavu, Lake Kivu,
Goma, Grand Marché, and Kongo. A genuine reading of “Defying Raging Night” absorbs
a reader, uniting her or him with the lyric persona as a Middle Passage
survivor who can know “black wonder soothing enough to/write letters in hope of
a Mockingbird spring.”
The
poems in Mockingbirds at Jerusalem
are aesthetic tools for building something positive and as yet unknown during
winter in America. Read.
Use the tools Rudolph Lewis has given us to increase our collective ability
to resist ignorant armies that clash in raging night. Read. Build critical independence.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. December 21, 2014
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