Triumphant Leaders Part 2
Marcus, as a child heard it all, the oral stories
Ancient in glories quickening his vein. Like blood
Rolling where the Roaring river runs, peonies
Calling up ancestral history in dream and flood
Unfold desires of in streams of African blood
Sentinelling the separate walls few understood
Grand visions comes from simple pains, O Garvey
Answer the call again, for we who forged oneness
Respecting constitution and creed, have tasted sourly
Vast tons of alienation, injustice, and wretchedness
Even Fanon could not describe. We need community
Yearning to build, yearning to rise, unshackled by history.
Malcom took the mantle towards a promise land
Angry and disgruntled using words for magic wand
Leader extraordinaire, do you remember him, Harlem
Clad in the beauty of your power, a black diadem
Overtly demanding that the police freed a wronged son
Master orator, how brief our black comets run
Let him remain an X to slavemasters filthy game
Inspired by greed to dehumanize us shackle shame
To our least Trans-Atlantic memory. But I will trace
True to the Little's pedigree, your father's Jamaican face
Leaving Maroon Town, St James, for this Egypt dark
Eke-ing existence to your soul, O what glory did he spark!
So Stokely, the Kwame Ture who died like a forest leaf
Thundered from your mountain with intellectual grief
Only a child barred from jim crow restroom and restaurants
Kindling racial pride could understand. Your spirit haunts
Eternally gloried diased ignorants. Starved by segragation
Lunch counters closed like social doors to all the race
You stood up, shouting power to minautor and monsters face.
Angela Davis, O how the pack hounds howled, pursuing you
Natural beauty, legally schooled, and yet an outcast
Granted no justice or reprieve while fearless for an alternative view
Etched upon the soul and suffering from the angry past
Lady, there is no statuesque liberty sweet as you
Leader of a ghetto stand so black men would not die invisible
Excluded by a muted history. This tribute is from all of us over due.
Copyright © L'Nass Shango | Year Posted 2009
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