Shadow and Act

Every spiral through time forces us to look at when the circle started and do everything we can to learn how the ancestors – at least some of them – learned to survive the storm and to fill themselves with hope when the violence and despair nearly starved their souls.  This very old poem called me to be attentive. But, then, so do the times in which we find ourselves.

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Mark the eternally
Redeeming fact
                            when
the shadow suffocates
your hope
                     act
past the lightning terror
of the demon days
unremembered passage
from home to hell
shackled
mute of drum
fashioning banquets from
glacial wrongs
                            Eden was 
redeemed in songs
an arthritic alien
hungering greed    ripped
families apart
                         the soul
was mastered by the shadow’s
need
to deny    and    shatter
to garble and grind
truth into ashes
the verdict of death:
make them blind
                             transfer
the blanket of the crime
to the shaking shoulders
of the bent and broken
let the shadow haunt   and   terrify
let all decency be deprived
until   freedom   spoke   in
the raining of a gun

the delusion of the shadow
was seen as fog
stinging fear     retreated
and the sweat-tasting hymn
of jubilee
                   caught the rhythm
of the drum
in spite of death
still we come
                           we choose
to shed the curse laid
on our back
                        and when
the shadow threatens
                                    act

            --Luke

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14 April 1978/ “For the CUASA Recognition Night” 
(Creighton University African American Student Association)