Elegy for Ralph Ellison

Elegy for Ralph Ellison

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”  (Milan Kundera)

Your face is so black Baby, it just disappears into the night frights, fades into the dark screams, hides inside envelopes, licking the tongue back, rolling the eyes of the red dwarf, sucking the snakes inside.

You were hell-bent on being visible, but
they were born without eyes. Illiterate,
feeble with lies, they reached inside your books, dirty old men looking for a quick feel, and got more than they Knew.

Now that you’ve gone, fear rips from the inside. They jerk to AK47s fired
from the future by boys born blind.

Ralph Baby, the house is burning the book down, but your words remain in the white hot flames.

Last night sixty silent mourners watched you fall
back, black into earth, your skin invisible against the rich warm ground.

Nixon died the same week. They plastered his very visible mug all over everything and forgot to remember the lies.
The post office was closed, the government shut down.  The flag, half mast, flapped half way around the pole in the harsh wind.

But more than sixty of us are remembering to remember; more than sixty of us are struggling against the tide of forgetting.

Our faces are so black, Baby, that we can’t
see ourselves in the river tonight. We stand on old rocks in the far north, summoning the eagles, watching the young black man chant words that burn on his tongue.

We are the millions unknown to you, Baby, invisible to those without eyes, invisible even to each other, but hell-bent on remembering.