Indigo Blues
(Dedicated to ancestor Dr. Amos Wilson)
(the audio of this poem is temporarily unavailable)
It started benign enough with a financial gift
to help establish
a research facility
then the
announcement of the cloning of Dolly the sheep
then the
cloning of animal meat for human consumption
as time passed or as economic political strife grew
some institute
think tank
academic
bureaucrat
strategist
came up with the “brilliant”
idea
let’s clone a labor force
for our national betterment
to make the clones readily identifiable
they decided to make the clones’ skin tone blue
however after objective analysis and rational thought
the cost of indigo was cost prohibitive
so they scrapped the plan and settled on using you.
By Kemit Mawakana (aka The Seven-Foot Poet)
Peace (when appropriate) War (when necessary)
Copyright 2004.
Kemit Mawakana (aka “The Seven-Foot Poet”) is a highly acclaimed spoken-word artist, and has published two books A . . . Z . . . Infinity and Crucifixion of My Soul. The collective body of his works presented weekly in BAR are in tribute to Listervelt Middleton, Dr. John Henrik Clarke, and “For The People”. Currently, he is a facilitator at AYA Educational Institute (www.ayaed.com) and can be reached at sevenfootpoet@gmail.com.
The chief of the Memphis, Tennessee police department took part in trainings in Israel. These exchanges with an apartheid state are a training ground for brutality.
This week we learn about the destruction of a Black community in Portland, Oregon and the legal efforts at restitution, and the struggle to fight for reform of the cash bail system in Minnesota. But…
Isaac Saney is a Cuba and Black studies specialist and historian at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
We now turn to a discussion of Albina, a Black community in Portland, Oregon which was devastated by so-called urban renewal in the 1950s and 1960s. The final blow came in the early 1970s, when an…
We are joined by Elizer Darris, Co-Executive Director of the Minnesota Freedom Fund (MFF).
