W. E. B. Dubois (From Pages)

Martin, Not the German patrician, his vision was a stair But our own peaceful prince Well he invoked you And not by calling Samuel back from the dead He invoked you as seeker He invoked as our searcher For history, he said, is built on truth No, not the lineal story Of one race's glory on my marginality Our history is always a collective place A yard of memory Where we meet at evening to tell The honey and milk Of our emasculated hell. There is no dying here How can we What will the predator parasite live on then So we are made Zombies of an eternal pain And you Our seeker for the antidote Between Fiske and Berlin Here we come again First son to be honored there Among the ivy league The doctor to proclaim Himself one tenth of all of us With the same double consciousness Was it not for Fanon I almost converged to the monstrosity But then looking back Over the Pan-African Secretariat I knew we will never be divided again So easily Just rivers of different colors Destined to end our struggle Down awful topography of mountains Down the callous memory of history Between the churning white teeth of the sea From my bridge I watched that wave rise and fall A thousand times Pushing us against gravity. Garvey would agree with me then He would shake his head When you were fled to Ghana When the merging was no longer tenable For a man lie to himself only for so long While he searches for truth I heard the abeng blow to call you home William ... was not found in their register William ... he was a Norse conqueror Edward ... and all of them spineless kings Burghardt ... and you ask me why Why should not a thing like this make Africa invisible? Du Bois ... so you mapped all the colonizers in your name No, not you, Our parents always conscious of their power Yet I knew every cocoon Is just another state of cobweb And you would broke free And many evenings I see you Just flying on a page of empty sky.