Exiled in the Country of Reason
To African American revolutionary Nelson Peery on the occasion of his 75^th Birthday

You have known roads as Langston
remembers rivers, as water flows through the cracked
earth, as the rust and dust settles into a steel mill's lament.
You have known roads, hoboing then laying down bricks,
plumbing level the offices and homes of a brick-lined America.
Rain drenched, the roads stretch across the years.
Once you showed me the structures in New York City
that you mortared to life and I thought about how
you also laid down stones for paths of learning,
paths of struggle—how you built a road inside me.

And the roads stretch on.

For more than 25 years, I have sought your counsel.
In you, dwell the graveled voices of a fractured century,
In you, echo the cries of hod carriers, mud mixers, melters and smelters,
In you, the song of resistance never dies,
In you, the sunlight behind the dark clouds of racial injustice breaks through,
In you, the callused palm heralding healing forms a firmer grip,
In you, the storms to quench the intractable fires of class warfare forever rages.

For 75 years you exiled yourself into the country of reason.

Here is where I have found residence:
In the road-stretched lines of your face,
in the father-love of your embrace,
as a world crumbles around its own madness,
and dwindles behind its calculated indignities
and tortured logics.
Here next to you, where knowledge
is an exploding bullet, I found home.

You are my most enduring and endearing teacher.

So as you looked into my suicide eyes so long ago,
as you found the life breaking out of this deadened soul,
as you took in this young slave and madman,
whose only vision came through the rifled bore of a gun,
you showed me this is not the way things have to be.

I believed because you believed.

Since then my life has been broken in two:
Before Nelson and after Nelson.
Since then I have tried—and failed, oh so often—
to emulate your spirit, your ways of knowing,
your patience and poetry. I had no other way to go.
And our love is the love of the same thing,
the rule of the eyes, ideas, and visions
of this martyred truth: Things don't have to be this way.

Now I have discovered the courage within
my own courage, to trace the poetry you expressed
inside my own expression.
Everything you have learned, anyone can learn,
you always said. Slow down, think, study.
Don't die until you have something to live for.

You believe because I believe.

Twenty-five years ago, when we first met in a simple house
in the cauldron called Watts,
I handed myself over to revolution
and have bled blossoms ever since.
I gave myself over to the brick-walled imaginations
that dared to dream a different dream.
For this I thank you, Nelson,
from where the tattered flag unfurls

and the road stretches on.