Somewhere I heard a Negro cry

Somewhere I heard a Negro cry

Of talk buried deep in dreams

The words more ours came back to me

Savage lines against my memory

Black hands and feet and faces

The act of nigger past

My pen; responding to the fury in my mind

Like a blade of grass bending to the wind

My language was theirs

Their pain was mine

I spoke as if it was a second tongue

My rage has captured my poems utterly

As I write the pencil inflict deep sore

Wounded I edit

Gnawing away at these foreign

Vocabularies to make the manic real


and let the spirit live-
---------------------------------
The more truth we seek
The more confused we are
Coz we are ashamed 2 see
The truth of our past

Are we free from shackles 2 day?
No not at all
Though there is no chain today
We are but still a slave