The Supremes
Mary was mysterious,
but the best dancer
Diana, the magnetic,
cooing romancer—
But, here’s a secret I know:
cats like me dug Miss Flo—
And the 4th Supreme’s ‘fro!
The 4th Supreme came
Singing tones ‘tween
Douglass and Carmen McRae—
Malcolm X and Lady Day
The 4th Supreme came
Singing “Stop In The Name Of Love!”
by way of Brandeis/Bombing-ham—
hitting Dynamite Hill high notes
The 4th Supreme came
Singing “Reflections”
in silver bracelets, on a
Newsweek cover captioned:
“Red, Black and Wanted!”
Hoover hated her harmonies with millions…
But I heard, “Set me free, why don’t you, babe?”
Rocking me to “ …Try Something New:”
Dialectics…
The 4th Supreme came
Singing, “I Hear A Symphony—”
“No Matter What Sign You Are,”
in ’08—but I
forgive her and comrades
and friends for singing flat
Madison Avenue smash hits: “Yes,
we can and bottle Jim Jones Juice;”
“regime Change you can believe in—”
delivering “Nothing But Heartaches” to
Honduras, Libya, Syria, Mother Africa…
© 2018. Raymond Nat Turner, The Town Crier. All Rights Reserved.
Raymond Nat Turner, our poet in residence, is an accomplished performing artist. You can find much more of his work at http://upsurgejazz.com.
Black memory is a muscle trained, flexed, and disciplined by colonialism, enslavement, and racial terror, as well as collective Black struggle.
Socialist ideas about the inextricable links between class, race, and gender predate the concept of intersectionality.
The struggle against systemic racism and the police state in the US is integral and linked to the struggle against US wars of aggression overseas.
Community control of police and prison abolition have been completely removed from the conversations dictated by a mainstream and complacent narrative.
Global Displacements is an examination of the impact of the global organization of capitalist accumulation and exploitation on the life and labor of Haitian and Dominica
