painting by Evamarie Juniper Bittleston

“Blues come after slavery cause blues got a life right here to sing about, real life not just in lost Africa or in the sky after we die; See the brothers say when we was in Africa blue was our favorite color but when we took that trip blue got bent then what it meant was something we lost something that made us sad (you blue Jim) or something beautiful like Louis the immortaler or Sidney Bechet blew.” Amiri Baraka from Africa Revisited a.k.a. Where Dat Stuff Come From? Recorded on Blueprints of Jazz Volume2 Billy Harper

Ka ‘Ba 

by Imamu Amiri Baraka

A closed window looks down

on a dirty courtyard, and black people

call across or scream or walk across

defying physics in the stream of their will

Our world is full of sound


Our world is more lovely than anyone’s


tho we suffer, and kill each other


and sometimes fail to walk the air

We are beautiful people with African imaginations


full of masks and dances and swelling chants

with African eyes, and noses, and arms

though we sprawl in grey chains in a place full of winters,

when what we want is sun.

We have been captured brothers

And we labor to make our getaway,

into the ancient image, into a new

correspondence with ourselves and our black family.

We need magic now we need the spells,

to rise up return, destroy, and create.

What will be