Incendiary Art: Ferguson, 2014
They should have
left him there
to be the center
of his own altar,
shat upon, he would have flowered,
his empty hands tucked, ass upended
like a newborn
the lengthy streak of browning
blood could be a sanctified walkway
for the church ladies
for the pokers with their sticks
for the lawbreakers and abiders
for that new kinda worship
they should have
taken advantage of those
fourteen thousand
four hundred seconds and thought
it over for fourteen thousand
more
how sobering it would be
breathless icon as traffic circle
every day
Chevys and livery cabs inching
around the stain
of him shriekers on the school bus
tasting his blossoming funk
in their clothes
having long ago given up
counting
flies
they should have
left his body
steaming on the asphalt
while passenger-side doors
wrenched from ‘80s sedans,
flaming barrels of garbage,
charred shards of drugstore,
and bare-chested boys, beautiful
and bulls-eyed,
blurred past in tribute
black lives
matter
most when they are in
motion, the hurtle and reverb
matter the rushed melody of fist
the shudderings of a scorched
throat matter
the engine that moves us
toward
each damnable dawn
matters
they should have
left him there
as proof
eventually the embers would
have died
in his hair
****
This week’s poem is from Incendiary Art, Patricia Smith’s collection of searing elegies for black lives destroyed. The title of the book – a 2018 Pulitzer prize finalist – is repeated in several poems that form a sequence, split and scattered across the text. Each poem-title follows the words, Incendiary Art, followed with a place-name denoting a racist atrocity.
Smith, who was born in Chicago in 1955, has commented that her title reflects the burning-down of the district where she grew up. “Incendiary” has a forceful metaphorical dimension, too: something that has the capacity to fire swift anger, and perhaps revolt. In Smith’s poetry, we can feel the heat of imagination fused with technical control; the artist’s “rage for order” combined with the elegist’s grief, and the activist’s rage for justice.
This week’s poem is a reaction to the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. His body was left for more than four hours, and a grand jury decided that his killer, police officer Darren Wilson, would not face charges.
Each new phase of Smith’s oration, crying out that “they” should have left Brown’s body in the street for even longer, summons us to bear witness and responsibility, through a scathingly sarcastic amplification of the secondary insult, the negligence towards the body. But, like other poems in the collection, those remembering Emmett Till, for example, this one is an act of disinterment. Smith insists that the body is seen, so that the crime is seen.
A combination of figures in the first stanza sees the corpse as both seed and sacred symbol, fertilised by being literally “shat upon”. The image of “the lengthy street of browning/ blood” as a walkway, used by people with various motivations, suggests “that new kinda worship” may be another cover-up. The colloquialism “kinda” seems to signal something false or slipshod, backsliding into idolatry, perhaps.
The second stanza moves to a grimmer level of realism: the body is left to rot, and become part of a roadscape. For the young “shriekers on the school bus”, horror is spiced with obsessed fascination. The metaphor of the first stanza is reprised, newly tainted, in “blossoming funk”.
Violence flares in the next stanza, in an almost surreal passage of clashing images, like a section from Picasso’s Guernica. But a quieter shockwave emanates from the three, lower-case words of the fourth stanza’s spare opening lines: “black lives/ matter…” Black Lives Matter, seminal in the Ferguson protests, was founded by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi in response to the 2012 killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, and advocates for nonviolent protest against police brutality to African Americans. A season of concentrated protest followed Brown’s death in 2014. Smith amplifies the movement’s statement from the angle of law enforcement: “black lives/matter/most when they are in/ motion…”
The lines jolt, collide and reel back. Never was irony so deadly serious. The verb “matter/matters” is subjected to anaphora spattered alliteratively, while the orator’s outcry rises to its despairing climax. If the “engine that moves us/ toward/ each damnable dawn” represents BLM’s drive for justice and change, it reaches a roadblock in that word beyond-words, “damnable.”
The last two tercets are downbeat. They suggest entropy, a natural mechanism working in every mortal body, and implicit in history. Smith’s writing does more than commemorate the murdered young men and their sorrowful mothers: it resurrects them in a form that resists oxidation – the bright fire of language, able, in Dylan Thomas’s words, to “rage, rage against the dying of the light”. But Smith also helps educate us. White people sometimes misunderstand the meaning of Black Lives Matter. May Smith’s insights help motivate and sustain the drive towards a dawn less damnable.
Incendiary Art by Patricia Smith is published by Bloodaxe Books in the UK, and TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press in the US. The Bloodaxe website also features some powerful recordings of Smith reading from her work.