Deeply influenced by the blues and jazz, Michael S. Harper draws attention in his work to the many injustices suffered by African Americans over the course of this country’s history. Then, like the musicians he so admires, out of this painful and even tragic legacy, he makes song.
More By This Poet
Here Where Coltrane Is
Soul and race
are private dominions,
memories and modal
songs, a tenor blossoming,
which would paint suffering
a clear color but is not in
this Victorian house
without oil in zero degree
weather and a forty-mile-an-hour wind;
it is all a well-knit family:
a love supreme.
Oak leaves pile up on...
Grandfather
In 1915 my grandfather’s
neighbors surrounded his house
near the dayline he ran
on the Hudson
in Catskill, NY
and thought they’d burn
his family out
in a movie they’d just seen
and be rid of his kind:
the death of a lone black
family is the Birth
of a Nation,
or...