Welcome to Sunday Morning Lyricality, featuring a weekly song or poem by a Minnesota writer. Our guest editor for February, 2021 is Mary Moore Easter.
Keno Evol has made the most of the associative powers of poetry in a little glimpse. Birds, bees, ants—tiny living things– join honey, flowers and breadcrumbs to lead us through homage to the past, help for the fallen, the honor of witness, and the sustenance of community culminating in the heartbreak of George Floyd’s final utterance. It gave me pleasure to locate these large concepts in miniature in specific lines of the poem. You may enjoy tracking them for yourselves.
Mary Moore Easter
a little glimpse
after ross gay
dedicated to the movement for George Floyd
keno evol
i’m not sure how it happened
it’s still fuzzy in my mind
perhaps the ants, all of them, too many to count
huddled around one of their own
one morning, who looked to be sleeping
or gone & left tiny crumbs of bread
in the event it should wake
or perhaps the birds, with their cousins
circled a sibling they saw dreaming
or something that involves stillness &
flowers and laid blooms at the foot
of where it last landed, in hopes
when it awoke it saw that there were others
remembering
or perhaps the bumblebees, unsure
why on of their neighbors left honey
that eventually after so many years
became what honey becomes
a crystallized sweet.
that does to the mouth what sweets do
make things hard to pronounce
like justice or country.
and when George said what he said
i gotta tell ya, my heart crumbled
like tiny crumbs of bread
you would feed a small bird
or its children
*****
Scroll to minute 3:12 on the video below to see/hear Keno Evol read “a little glimpse” from Can’t Stop Won’t Stop. Created for Rain Taxi’s video-launch of the book by the multimedia production company iDream.tv, this lovingly filmed tribute showcases the rage, grief, and sheer power of poetry speaking back to injustice.
Keno Evol is a poet, educator, and independent scholar. He serves as the Founder and Executive Director of Black Table Arts, and is editor of A Garden of Black Joy: Global Poetry From The Edges of Liberation And Living.
Click here to learn more about Keno in this I AM (Artist in Motion) interview.