Читать книгу The Last Poets - Christine Otten - Страница 34

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AKRON, OHIO, 1967

The Poet

‘Can I have your Newsweek? There’s something I want to cut out.’

‘What?’

‘Here, look.’

He held up the magazine, opened to the pages he had just read. Mama put on the glasses that hung from her neck on the gold-colored chain.

‘Who’s that?’ She looked at the picture that went with the article. A small man with bulging eyes and a beard. A bandage around his head, a stream of blood trickling along his forehead, past his eyebrow and over his cheek.

‘He’s a poet,’ Omar said.

‘He doesn’t look like a poet.’

‘He’s wounded.’

‘I can see that.’

‘The dude says some amazing stuff.’

‘Like what?’

‘Read it, underneath.’

Mama grabbed the magazine from him and held it close to her face.

‘What’s he doing in Newsweek?’ She took off her glasses. Looked straight at her son.

‘He’s right.’

‘You think so?’

‘’Course.’

‘That’s not why they put his picture in Newsweek. And you know it.’

She put the magazine back on the kitchen table. Stood stock-still in front of him, her arms at her side, her glasses resting on her chest. She was wearing a green cotton sleeveless dress. It was summer. Omar looked at her thin, light-brown arms. Her frail figure in the late-afternoon sunlight that shone through the kitchen window. The dust in the air. As though her serenity made everything go quiet. His thoughts. The riot in his head after reading about the wounded black poet from Newark. Omar’s eyes glided across the table, the open Newsweek. He read, for the umpteenth time, the quote in bold letters under the picture of Amiri Baraka. ‘SMASH THOSE JELLY WHITE FACES.’

‘D’you remember that poem I wrote for my final exam? That poem about the teachers?’

‘It was good.’

‘Mr. Giovanni said I should’ve done it earlier. He said I was too late. That I’d wasted my talents at school. Bullshit.’

‘Go on and cut that picture out.’

‘It is bullshit, right?’

‘You just be careful.’