Bibliofreakblog

FreeVerse: in the year i loved your mother

Cara has taken a hiatus from blogging, but we seem to have convinced her to write up a bunch of FreeVerse posts and schedule them in advance.  So yay for FreeVerse and boo on busy lives that keep people from blogging.

I’m not much for slam poetry any more, but Regie Gibson, arguably one of the greatest slam poets of all freaking time, is someone that I still love profoundly.  

When I was a senior in high school, I was on a poetry slam team, that went to the National Team Poetry Slam, held that year just a hop skip and a jump from us in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  I was lucky enough to attend a workshop led by Regie Gibson, and get him to autograph my book (which had just come out that year–2001).  I collect autographed books, but this is still one of my most cherished.  

From that book, entitled Storms Beneath the Skin, is one of my favorite poems, “in the year i loved your mother”.  Because he’s a slam poet, many of his poems tend to be long (but not too long, of course, as they must be under 3 minutes!) but this is sort of medium length.  I thought about featuring different poems, mainly “bloozman” or “jazz people” or really, any poem in the whole damn book, but went with my first instinct.

If you ever have the opportunity to see him preform (and he is ridiculously hard to find online, so I have no idea what he’s up to these days) or better yet, take a class with him, drop everything and do it.

“in the year i loved your mother” by Reggie Gibson

(for my daughter safiya who needs to know this)

in the year i loved your mother
i lived a glorious death
i was satellite traveling through rage and grief

in the year i loved your mother
was a time of drought and deluge
a season of rain and ruin

between us     much soil and water
an illiterate ocean of language and diction

i arrived to her half broken half breaking

in the year i loved your mother
we were drum and drone
a volley of polemic and ideal

once     i glimpsed you
waving at me from her mouth 
as dawn met our shoulders
she whispered your name

we became the thin line
between sea and mountain 
valley and sky

in the year i loved your mother
gravity abandoned me to her
she was vortex – a black hole
sewn into the belly of continent  
crushing all into singularity.

grapewaswinewas
soundwassongwas
motionwasdancewas
dovewasvulturecirclingwaslandingwas
all     that     was     :     was     herYYY

the year i loved your mother
was the year tragedy tamed tongues

we severed ours     stitched them into
one anothers mouths     we grew fluent
in speaking pain

we brought stones from our pockets
traded them     hurled them back towards
each others wounds     and those that missed
were gathered later     were used to build our walls

she was an equinox of razors when i found her
an autumn of featherless wings
caught in this gale of a man

your mother was: soft lips cutting calluses
from my knuckles

a silk fist logged hard in my mouth

where it opened into a sunflower
widening in the crag of my throat

in her skin i was cryptic blasphemy
transparent     decoded     holy