Uploaded September 2019 | Updated September 2026, 8 hours ago
From the album: Live in San Francisco (Impulse, 1967). Roswell Rudd, trombone; Archie Shepp, tenor sax, piano (here, recitation); Donald Garrett, Lewis Worrell, bass; Beaver Harris, drums. Recorded at the Both/And Club, San Francisco, CA, February 19, 1966.
Text of the poem (my transcription):
The Wedding
We sat ten abreast
on logs that stretched
the entire length
of the room.
I knelt and kissed the ring
on the baptist’s hand.
‘Thankyou Jesus!’ Sister Beatrice said.
‘Praise Him’. This from the steely black men
whose corned haunches ached from the cold.
Pearly Mae got down on her knees
so that the weight of the baby was shifted
to her thighs, while outside Black Junior
advanced on Panamanian Red
and Hector stuck a spike straight into the ball
of his eye.
The buttered knifes, cold of Lexington’s floors,
lay cleft between Hecate’s breasts,
and men’s buttocks shivered
with the peculiar rhythm
of bullocks to flies.
They had been born in a Christian climate
and capitalism had picked them clean.
They wore the intense gaze of deacons
and stropped twelve foot
raised razors over bloody crocus axe.
They sipped scag from spoons,
or good coke when they could get it.
The seats of their pants were shiny
and stank like their feet,
so they were ashamed to undress in front of women,
and when they went back into the church,
Black Junior seemed to soar past the preacher
in his metal casket
straight through the gleaming eyes of God.
‘I say thankyou Jesus!’ Sister Beatrice said.
Pearly Mae screamed and clutched her groin.
In that instant of death, she had given life,
and I had become a man with the slippery future of a fish.
I had bellowed Harlem inside her,
and she swelled
into loaves of yeasty cities,
light bread on a poisoned river –
‘*You* poisoned the river’, she said,
then retrieved me
with the songs of Damballah and Engels on her lips.
From the album: Live in San Francisco (Impulse, 1967). Roswell Rudd, trombone; Archie Shepp, tenor sax, piano (here, recitation); Donald Garrett, Lewis Worrell, bass; Beaver Harris, drums. Recorded at the Both/And Club, San Francisco, CA, February 19, 1966.
Text of the poem (my transcription):
The Wedding
We sat ten abreast
on logs that stretched
the entire length
of the room.
I knelt and kissed the ring
on the baptist’s hand.
‘Thankyou Jesus!’ Sister Beatrice said.
‘Praise Him’. This from the steely black men
whose corned haunches ached from the cold.
Pearly Mae got down on her knees
so that the weight of the baby was shifted
to her thighs, while outside Black Junior
advanced on Panamanian Red
and Hector stuck a spike straight into the ball
of his eye.
The buttered knifes, cold of Lexington’s floors,
lay cleft between Hecate’s breasts,
and men’s buttocks shivered
with the peculiar rhythm
of bullocks to flies.
They had been born in a Christian climate
and capitalism had picked them clean.
They wore the intense gaze of deacons
and stropped twelve foot
raised razors over bloody crocus axe.
They sipped scag from spoons,
or good coke when they could get it.
The seats of their pants were shiny
and stank like their feet,
so they were ashamed to undress in front of women,
and when they went back into the church,
Black Junior seemed to soar past the preacher
in his metal casket
straight through the gleaming eyes of God.
‘I say thankyou Jesus!’ Sister Beatrice said.
Pearly Mae screamed and clutched her groin.
In that instant of death, she had given life,
and I had become a man with the slippery future of a fish.
I had bellowed Harlem inside her,
and she swelled
into loaves of yeasty cities,
light bread on a poisoned river –
‘*You* poisoned the river’, she said,
then retrieved me
with the songs of Damballah and Engels on her lips.
