The following transcript is provided for accessibility only. Layout, formatting, and typography of poems may differ from the original text. We recommend referring to the original, published works when possible to experience the poems as intended by their authors.
[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!
[Music outro]
- Back to Poems on Air: Episode 45
DISCLAIMER: This is NOT a certified or verbatim transcript, but rather represents only the context of the class or meeting, subject to the inherent limitations of real-time captioning. The primary focus of real-time captioning is general communication access and as such this document is not suitable, acceptable, nor is it intended for use in any type of legal proceeding. Transcript provided by the author.