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    Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth: New and Selected Poems, 2001-2021
    Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth: New and Selected Poems, 2001-2021
    Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth: New and Selected Poems, 2001-2021
    Ebook269 pages1 hour

    Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth: New and Selected Poems, 2001-2021

    By Yusef Komunyakaa

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    About this ebook

    New and selected poems from the great Pulitzer Prize–winning poet

    These songs run along dirt roads
    & highways, crisscross lonely seas
    & scale mountains, traverse skies
    & underworlds of neon honkytonk,
    Wherever blues dare to travel.

    Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth brings together selected poems from the past twenty years of Yusef Komunyakaa’s work, as well as new poems from the Pulitzer Prize winner. Komunyakaa’s masterful, concise verse conjures arresting images of peace and war, the natural power of the earth and of love, his childhood in the American South and his service in Vietnam, the ugly violence of racism in America, and the meaning of power and morality.

    The new poems in this collection add a new refrain to the jazz-inflected rhythms of one of our “most significant and individual voices” (David Wojahn, Poetry). Komunyakaa writes of a young man fashioning a slingshot, workers who “honor the Earth by opening shine / inside the soil,” and the sounds of a saxophone filling a dim lounge in New Jersey. As April Bernard wrote in The New York Times Book Review, “He refuses to be trivial; and he even dares beauty.”

    "Probably my favorite living poet. No one else taught me more about how important it was to think about how words make people feel. It's not enough for people to know something is true. They have to feel it's true." —Ta-Nehisi Coates, The New York Times Style Magazine

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJun 15, 2021
    ISBN9780374600143
    Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth: New and Selected Poems, 2001-2021
    Author

    Yusef Komunyakaa

    Yusef Komunyakaa’s books of poems include Warhorses (FSG, 2008), Taboo (FSG, 2004), and Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. He teaches at New York University.  

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    Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth - Yusef Komunyakaa

    Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth by Yusef Komunyakaa

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    Table of Contents

    A Note About the Author

    Copyright Page

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    Farrar, Straus and Giroux ebook.

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    TO MY DAUGHTERS AND GRANDDAUGHTER:

    KIMBERLY, SHOSHANA, AND IMANI

    MOJO SONGS

    (NEW POEMS)

    A WORLD OF DAUGHTERS

    Say licked clean at birth. Say

    weeping in the tall grass, where

    this tantalizing song begins,

    birds paused on a crooked branch

    over a grave of an unending trek

    into the valley of cooling waters.

    Lessons of earth, old questions

    unmoor the first tongue. Say

    I have gone back, says the oracle,

    counting seasons & centuries, undoing fault

    lines between one generation & next,

    as she twirls sackcloth edged with pollen,

    & one glimpses what one did not know. Say

    this is where the goat was asked to speak

    legends ago, to kneel & deliver a sacrifice.

    To feel a truth depends on how & why

    the singer’s song fits into the mouth.

    Well, I believe the borrowed-rib

    story is the other way round, entangled

    in decree, blessing, law, & myth. One

    only has to listen to nightlong pleas

    of a mother who used all thousand

    chants & prayers of clay, red ocher

    blown from the mouth upon the high

    stone wall, retracing a final land bridge

    to wishbone. My own two daughters

    & granddaughter, the three know how

    to work praise & lament, ready to sprout

    wings of naked flight & labor. Yes,

    hinged into earth, we rose from Lucy

    to clan, from clan to tribe, & today

    we worship her sun-polished bones,

    remembering she is made of questions.

    No, mama is not always a first word

    before counting eggs in the cowbird’s

    nest. It begins in memory. Now, say

    her name, say Dinknesh, mother of us all.

    OUR SIDE OF THE CREEK

    We piled planks, sheets of tin,

    & sandbags across the creek

    till the bright water rose

    & splayed both sides,

    swelling into our hoorah.

    Our hard work brought July

    thrashers & fat June bugs

    in decades of dead leaves.

    Water moccasins hid in holes

    at the brim of the clay bank

    as the creek eased up pelvic

    bones, hips, navel, & chest,

    to eyelevel. When the boys

    dove into our swim hole

    we pumped our balled fists

    to fire up their rebel yells.

    The Jim Crow birds sang

    of persimmon & mayhaw

    after a 12-gauge shotgun

    sounded in the mossy woods.

    If we ruled the day an hour

    the boys would call girl cousins

    & sisters, & they came running

    half naked into a white splash,

    but we could outrun the sunset

    through sage & rabbit tobacco,

    born to hide each other’s alibis

    beneath the drowned sky.

    SLINGSHOT

    A boy’s bicycle inner tube

    red as inside the body,

    a well-chosen forked limb

    sawed from a shrub oak,

    & then an hour-long squint

    to get it right. The taut pull is

    everything. There’s nothing

    without resistance, & the day

    holds. The hard, slow, steady

    honing flips a beetle on its back,

    but the boy refuses to squash it.

    He continues with his work.

    Summer rambles into a quiet

    quantum of dogwood & gum—

    a girl he’s too shy to tell his name

    stands in damp light nearing dark,

    & biting a corner of his lip

    he whittles the true stock,

    knowing wrong from right.

    Though Pythagoras owned

    a single truth, the boy

    untangles a triangle of pull

    within a triangle of release,

    the slingshot’s tongue a tongue

    torn out of an old army boot,

    & Lord, what a perfect fit.

    Feet spread apart, the boy

    straddles an imaginary line,

    settling quietly into himself

    as the balance & pull travel

    down through his fingers,

    forearm, elbow, into muscle,

    up through his shoulder blades,

    neck, mouth, set of the jaw,

    into the register of the brain,

    saying, Take a breath & exhale

    slowly, then let the stone fly

    as if it has swallowed a stone,

    & that is when the boy knows

    his body is a compass, a cross.

    A PRAYER FOR WORKERS

    Bless the woman, man, & child

    who honor earth by opening shine

    inside the soil—the splayed hour

    between dampness & dust—to plant

    seedlings in double furrows, & then pray

    for cooling rain. Bless the fields,

    the catch, the hunt, & the wild fruit,

    & let no one go hungry tonight

    or tomorrow. Let the wind & birds

    seed a future ferried into villages

    & towns the other side of mountains

    along nameless rivers. Bless those

    born with hands made to grapple

    hewn timbers & stone raised from earth

    & shaped in circles, who know the geometry

    of corners, & please level the foundation

    & pitch a roof so good work isn’t diminished

    by rain. Bless the farmer with clouds

    in his head, who lugs baskets of dung

    so termites can carve their hives

    that hold water long after a downpour

    has gone across the desert & seeds

    sprout into a contiguous greening.

    Bless the iridescent beetle working

    to haul the heavens down, to journey

    from red moondust to excrement.

    The wage slave two-steps from Dickens’s

    tenements among a den of thieves,

    blind soothsayers who know shambles

    where migrants feathered the nests

    of straw bosses as the stonecutters

    perfect profiles of robber barons

    in granite & marble in town squares

    along highways paved for Hollywood.

    Bless souls laboring in sweatshops,

    & each calabash dipper of water,

    the major & minor litanies & ganglia

    dangling from promises at the mouth

    of the cave, the catcher of vipers at dawn

    in the canebrake & flowering fields,

    not for love of money but for bread

    & clabber on a thick gray slab table,

    for the simple blessings in a hamlet

    of the storytellers drunk on grog.

    Bless the cobbler, molding leather

    on his oaken lasts, kneading softness

    & give into a red shoe & a work boot,

    never giving more to one than the other,

    & also the weaver with closed eyes

    whose fingers play the ties & loops

    as if nothing else matters, daybreak

    to sunset, as gritty stories of a people

    grow into an epic stitched down

    through the ages, the outsider artists

    going from twine & hue, cut & tag,

    an ironmonger’s credo of steam rising

    from buckets & metal dust, & the clang

    of a hammer against an anvil,

    & the ragtag ones, a whole motley crew

    at the end of the line, singing ballads

    & keeping time on a battered tin drum.

    THE CANDLELIGHT LOUNGE

    All the little doors unlock

    in the brain as the saxophone

    nudges the organ & trap drums

    till an echo of the Great Migration

    tiptoes up & down the bass line.

    Faces in semi-dark cluster around

    a solo, edging toward a town of steel

    & car lines driven by conveyor belts.

    But now only a sign stutters across

    the Delaware, saying, Trenton Makes

    The World Takes. With one eye

    on the players at the Candlelight

    & the other on televised Olympians

    home is a Saturday afternoon

    around the kidney-shaped bar.

    These songs run along dirt roads

    & highways, crisscross lonely seas

    & scale mountains, traverse skies

    & underworlds of neon honkytonk,

    wherever blues dare to travel.

    A swimmer climbs a diving board

    in Beijing, does a springy toe dance

    on the edge, turns her head

    toward us, & seems to say, Okay,

    you guys, now see if you can play this.

    She executes a backflip,

    a triple spin, a half twist,

    held between now & then,

    & jackknifes through the water,

    & it is what pours out of the horn.

    SHELTER

    Becky grew up in the provinces of the blackest, richest Delta silt this side of cut & run. When the wind rampaged in from the east she could taste the soil, & naturally it was biblical. The boy came one June morning to work on her daddy’s egg farm. Both were fourteen—he three days older than she. His job was to feed the two-thousand-odd white leghorn hens, to gather the pearly ovals in baskets & carry them to the grading shed where Stella cleaned off flecks of shit & held each egg up to a beaming light, then placed them into white dozen-size papery cartons. Sometimes Becky worked beside the tall black woman for the fun of it, mirroring her moves. Also, she liked looking at the boy gathering the eggs. But they didn’t dare let

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