On a Sunday

for Amiri Baraka

eye remember seeing the oblong fruit—mango,
papaya—in a photo of a lynched black man's

head fixed above the exclamation point of his tad-
pole body, swaying easy in a tree in a gentle

breeze, it is summer in my memory, warm,
not yet swelteringly hot in southern steel country

alabama, outside birmingham, where
john coltrane blew hauntingly of four little black girls

blown to smithereens on a sunday, in church,
eye also remember hearing chuck berry playing guitar

on a sunday, in the back seat of his white cadillac car,
driven by his red-haired black wife, cruising st. louis

blues streets, singing, "roll over beethoven,
tell tchaikovsky the news, there's a new kind

of music called rhythm 'n' blues," on that sunday
the sky was blue as it was in my memory—

where all things are elusively fixed,
because nothing is ever permanent save change—

cobalt blue, sapphire blue, cerulean blue
when eye saw the lynched man's head in the photograph

oblique above the exclamation point of his tadpole body,
it was a sapphire-blue sunday in the deep freeze

of january, when barack obama
took the oath of office, became the forty-fourth

president of this divided nation in crisis,
the voices of reason were thrown out the window

like bathwater, soap, an infant in a small plastic tub,
a bawling baby hitting the ground, breath atomized

as vaporizing matter, misted into the air in a fog
like an elegy, a sunday listening to punditry talking—

points hitting the fan on TV screens, their elegies
leering all over the planet, richly paid for drivel,

their infested dialogue, their blather like plagues,
prattling disinformation, sluiced through airwaves,

zapping clueless people inside their atomized brains,
glued, as they are, to these talking heads flashing

expensive dental-wear as they natter their shopworn
rhetoric into cameras, connecting us to them

through plasma TV screens, on glory bird sundays
& the blues as a way of life everywhere, even on sundays

when all things are elusively fixed, even words of sermons,
because nothing is ever permanent save change,

the sky sometimes blue as a sapphire woman
wearing red, her hips moving from side to side, beckoning

with her sensuous, sashaying hips, come-t0-me-poppa strut,
seducing where the gospel of sweetness is elusively fixed

inside a church, a juke joint, the music hot as her allure,
hittin' it, layin' the mojo down, conjurin' up wicked

spirits, as poets raising the roof from its foundation up
into cerulean-blue, sapphire-blue, cobalt-blue air,

preachers running the gospel down on sundays with their
sermons everywhere, people living inside their memories,

where all things are elusively fixed, but here
nothing is ever permanent save change after change

nothing is ever permanent save change