Matters

as the black blood flows 

through veins to a weary heart

tea perfumes the air

I was listening to Esther Forbes' Johnny Tremain  this morning as I was getting my steps, and got to the part where the Boston Tea Party is going on. So many of the details paralleled some of the things going on right now. Not just the protests or the "acts of violence," though of course that. But also how in the aftermath of the protest, the economy was effectively shut down by the British government, so people couldn't work, rent couldn't be paid, and people began to get hungry.

Of course, the Brits saw the Americans--who, by the way, had blackened their faces in addition to donning mock "Indian" garb--as lawless ruffians who should be imprisoned or even put to death. 

Anyway...in the description of the Tea Party itself, there were some details which I'd never heard of or intuited before. (I'm assuming that Esther Forbes didn't just make this stuff up...which I think is a safe assumption, given the fact that she wrote extensively about this time period.) One was the fact that when the Americans broke open the crates, they found that the tea had been put into canvas bags, and that it was more problematic to get the tea out of those bags than it was to break open the crates. The second was that after the tea had been thrown into Boston Harbor, the smell of tea filled the air. It made me think of a time a few years ago when a terrific wind uprooted dozens of fir trees in my neighborhood. Roads were blocked, houses were damaged, and everyone was forlorn...but it smelled like Christmas.

As all of that was rolling around in my mind, I started thinking that I would like to write a poem which conflated a Black Lives Matter protest with the Boston Tea Party. The more I thought about it, though, the more tedious and pretentious it became in my mind. So I thought, "It is almost impossible to write a pretentious haiku, though." So that's what I aimed for.

Most of it is self-explanatory, and perhaps poems shouldn't be explained--at least not by the poet--anyway, but ahmo go for just a little some of that anyway. The black blood is obvious...both literal (as in police beat protesters and drew blood) and figurative (as in the blood of heritage, including the bitter heritage of slavery and racism). I chose to have it flow through veins because that means the blood has been used up, is exhausted, and is going back to the heart to be renewed. To me, that's what Black Lives Matter is about. After using black people for hundreds of years, they are saying, "We are dying. Give us what we deserve, give us what we have earned." I chose to make the heart weary because that's my image of America...specifically white America...right now. It is weary because it doesn't want to act in the name of justice. It is weary because it just wants to keep the status quo, it wants to ignore the unfairness it has been built on. It just doesn't want to be bothered. Ironically, though, it is also weary because what it needs is for replenished blood to flow through its arteries. America needs its black folks. Always has. Always will. Look at how many ways black culture has invigorated American culture...from music to language to cinema to sports and back. 

And of course the last line of my haiku is a direct reference to my Johnny Tremain Boston Tea Party experience this morning. Because the Black Lives Matter protests really are, in many ways, the equivalent of the Boston Tea Party. Just as the colonists were sick of being exploited and tyrannized by the Brits, so are black folks sick of being exploited and tyrannized by white America...or at least that portion of white America which is racist and unfair, since obviously not all white people are that way. (But a whole fucking lot of them are, and there's just no denying that.)

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