Birth of the Blues
by Beth Brown Preston
Was it Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" bringing me home to you?
Or the musical memories of our mutual histories?
Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll laid back and fingering those piano keys,
on an instrument played by Langston Hughes, Bontemps, Zora Neale and Countee Cullen
while black women danced a close sweating two-step
with their men in Harlem jook joints?
Were the blues born on sultry evenings under canopies of stars?
Come into this world between dark southern thighs
while our enslaved ancestors danced to strumming banjos, wailing mouth harps
and ancient rhythms of violins, tambourines and drums?
Men and women dancing to words become songs:
work songs
praise songs
kin songs to the blues?
Were the blues born with the birth of "The New Negro?"
or "the flowering of Negro literature"? Or were the blues
more hidden, ever more subtle in the eyes and in the voices of Harlem?
In the lyrics of Billie Holiday crooning "Strange Fruit"at Café Society?
Or the crackle of Louis Armstrong's accent?
or the clarion call of his trumpet?
Was it in the unstoppable Trane: a love supreme flowing from his horn?
Or in a Black child's first step?
Black man, my lover, I held your newborn in my arms
wondering just what he would make of this world,
a world he gazed on with sad, irreverent yet innocent brown eyes.
Black man, my lover, do not ask me
how you will survive without the blues.
An All-American Girl - For Gwendolyn Brooks
by Beth Brown Preston
Topeka, Kansas, June 7th, 1917
Keziah:
Our baby girl's birth was not an easy one. She lingered low
inside my womb for days and nights. Stubborn. Defiant even.
Willfully against a world she someday would come to know.
The midwife and her sister arrived singing comfort to me
sweet gospel hymns I recalled from those church Sunday's.
"Push. Push." My baby girl loosened her grip upon my womb
and entered this world squalling up a storm, telling us of her own pain.
David and I, we named our baby Gwendolyn Elizabeth -- the tigress, the fierce.
David:
I hear Gwendolyn's voice at birth coming on strong.
We wanted her to own her mother's gift for music,
hoped for the songs already to live inside her, to imitate the music
of Kezzie playing Mozart or Haydn on our old upright piano
while she floated in the waters of her belly.
My poppa never lived to greet his grandbaby, my father,
a brave man who fled his destiny or chains and slavery
to join the Union Army and fight in the Civil War.
Poppa would have been so proud of our baby girl.
Keziah:
Washed clean of my blood, she nursed at my swollen breast,
lapped the milk of our songs. Baptized in holy and sanctifying grace,
at home, sleeping in my arms, she seemed to know all wisdom.
Gifted of a thought deep and wide as the waters of the Kaw
or the watershed of Shunganunga Creek, she was moistened
with our kisses as we celebrated her born day, already knowing
whome she might become -- so beauteous of regard, so righteous of language.