Highflown:Love
by Eugene B. Redmond
In the highflown language
Of moon travelers
Social Scientists sort our hurts—
Add their smog-crippled vision—
And rearrange our private pains
Along the Wall Street of current demands:
And my people become the
Cocaine that makes America high:
Become dreams
America sucks through maniacal straws of sleep;
Discounting our lore,
The scientists say we cannot love
say our needs are numbed:
But, sometimes,
When you construct knots in my throat
And your lips re-create my heartclock
I am hypnotized by the aggregate passion
Of my past by the sun of my historical ecstasy:
A power we know
Cannot be stilled by airborne theories of scholars
Nestled in Freudian citadels
A power that cannot be seen
Heard
Or flattened to fit the pages of a book
From: THE EYE IN THE CEILING: SELECTED POEMS. Harlem River Press, 1991
Most Poetry will post a poem by a Black poet each day through the month of June.