[Music intro]

LYNNE THOMPSON: Hello! My name is Lynne Thompson, Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles and I’m so happy to welcome listeners to this installment of Poems on Air, a podcast supported by the Los Angeles Public Library. Every week, I’ll present the work of poets I admire, poets who you should know, and poets who have made a substantial and inimitable contribution to the art and craft of poetry.

LYNNE THOMPSON: It’s February 2022 and so we commence a month-long celebration of Black History Month. It gives Poems on Air the opportunity to highlight how important it is for all readers and listeners to have access to writers working across the African diaspora and to celebrate just a few of the fine poets writing in that tradition and heritage. No one could kick off this project better than Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Tyehimba Jess. Jess is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including the PEN Jean Stein Book Award, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His collections of poetry include Leadbelly and Olio and he serves as President of the Board of Directors of Cave Canem.

LYNNE THOMPSON: Today’s poem is "Fort Mose" by Tyehimba Jess.

Fort Mose

They weren’t headed north to freedom—
they fled away from the North Star,
turned their back on the Mason-Dixon line,
put their feet to freedom by fleeing
farther south to Florida.
Ran to where `gator and viper roamed
free in the mosquito swarm of Suwannee.
They slipped out deep after sunset,
shadow to shadow, shoulder to shoulder,
stealing southward, stealing themselves,
steeling their souls to run steel
through any slave catcher who’d dare
try stealing them back north.
They billeted in swamp mud,
sawgrass, and cypress—
they waded through waves 
of water lily and duckweed.
They thinned themselves in thickets
and thorn bush hiding their young
from thieves of black skin marauding
under moonlight and cloud cover.
Many once knew another shore
an ocean away, whose language,
songs, stories were outlawed 
on plantation ground. In swampland,
they raised flags of their native tongues
above whisper smoke
into billowing bonfires
of chant, drum, and chatter.
They remembered themselves
with their own words
bleeding into English, 
bonding into Spanish,
singing in Creek and Creole.
With their sweat
forging farms in
unforgiving heat,
never forgetting scars
of the lash, fighting 
battle after battle
for generations.
Creeks called them Seminole
when they bonded with renegade Creeks.
Spaniards called them cimarrones
runaway—escapees from Carolina
plantation death-prisons.
English simply called them Maroons
flattening the Spanish to make them 
seem alone, abandoned, adrift—
but they were bonded,
side by side,
Black and Red,
in a blood-red hue—
maroon.
Sovereignty soldiers,
Black refugees,
self-abolitionists, fighting
through America’s history,
marooned in a land
they made their own,
acre after acre,
plot after plot,
war after war,
life after life.
They fought only 
for America to let them be
marooned—left alone—
in their own unchained,
singing,
worthy 
blood.

LYNNE THOMPSON: The Los Angeles Poet Laureate was created as a joint program between the City’s Department of Cultural Affairs and the Los Angeles Public Library and this podcast is available wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening!

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• Back to Poems on Air: Episode 45



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