Memory Needs a Friend

Before America had a microphone

America had a campfire.

Stories carried orally

passed down, through the generations

Early people could comprehend

Memory doesn’t require a printing press

Memory needs a friend

Stories were heard, and told and shared

in Circles and campfire rings

Then the Europeans arrived

with muskets, Bibles and deeds

These new people held curious positions

they acted like ‘it did not happen’

if you did not pen it.

A peculiar conviction.

But it did not stop the enslaved from singing

Spiritual Songs with their double meanings

Freedom rang out in melody.

Songs last longer than anybody.

white corn cakes wrapped in cloth, cool water sealed in jars, swinging low, sweet chariot tonight your train arrives.

Then we meet the American preachers.

Gold laced handkerchiefs and polished shoes

Sing three songs, stand up, sit down, three verses and an altar call.

The pulpit became the theater.

When poetry first met the trumpet

The movement of blues loosened our ties

Jazz took grammar behind the shed

and taught it how to improvise.

one foot dragging its way through heartbreak

and the other, keeping time.

Langston Hughes, Zora Nele Hurston and Mr. Wallace Thurman

asked our nation to consider the black voice alive in Harlem

Liberty established for white kinsmen

This Freedom disguised left black folks, tied

to curfews, locks and borders.

white corn cakes wrapped in cloth, cool water sealed in jars, swinging low, sweet chariot tonight your train arrives.

Then a preacher claimed

“I have a dream,”

This chant became a chorus

Then came the marches

and the microphones

Then came the bridges, the busses, the courthouse lawns.

And one speech became a movement, featured on the evening news.

And now?

Everybody has a microphone

We talk to followers that we cannot see

we tell stories to fuel algorithms

and call it a live stream.

But, somewhere deep

in the American soul

something softer calls.

the spoken words

of those long gone

still gather all around us.

Not everything worth remembering

is always written down.

Some things lasted because a grandma taught in song.

And somewhere, in some hollow, the campfire still survives

These are the places that give stories life.

white corn cakes wrapped in cloth, cool water sealed in jars, swinging low, sweet chariot

tonight your train arrives.