Someone who knew me well
And that I’d lived
In many a gray shack
My mother transformed
With flowers
Took me to your house
To meet you:
To see the shacks
You rescued from our shame
And transformed with your wit,
Small nails, old boards,
And paint.
I was enchanted to see
My mother’s magic
Emerge
From the end
Of your brush.
Now you have left us. The streaming
Light through all your shacks’
Cracks
Like the streaming genius
Of your own obsessed mind.
How do we make new
And restorative of soul
The old pain? How do we learn
To carry with grace and humor
All that has happened to us?
Buchanan, for instance. Whose name
Was that before it was slapped across
The memory of the enslaved?
Your ancestors
In Africa were not Buchanans
And may have been esteemed artists
Every one of them,
For all we know.
Ah, Beverly,
All of us in our age clan
Are in the homestretch now.
We will not be far behind you.
Trailing our chalk, our pencil sticks
With which we wrote and drew in the dirt,
Our paints made from berries, barks,
And tears.
With open hands
We have offered our art
Made from whatever scraps
Were left over from our destruction,
Their absence from
The big house table of greed and ignorance
Never missed.
This poem is to say how glad I am
To have the shack
You made for me. Red as a strawberry!
I would never have thought of that; yet
How right it has turned out to be.
For I do not wallow in sadness
Though it visits more often these days
Than I would like;
The world is dying
In so many ugly ways
And humans with it.
And yet, against all odds
I realize
There will always be a Beverly Buchanan
Arising from a virtual “nowhere”
To cobble together the broken pieces
-Left over from the beauty
That is destroyed-
And paint them red
For dancing.
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