Big thanks to Jerry Jazz Musician for continuing to publish poems about jazz, and it’s my extreme pleasure to have more of my work appear there. This one, which appears in THE BLACKENED BLUES (pick up your copy here!), concerns (and celebrates) one of the all-time American iconoclasts, Herman Poole Blount, aka SUN RA.
Sun Ra’s* Spaceship
I’m not of this world, Ra insisted, and it was obvious
to everyone: He ain’t one of us. You see, he swore, I am
from out there: I conjure up other worlds that could break your brain.
And to be Blount? This claim was only scarcely less credible
than faithful suckers talking to an old man in outer space.
Listen: magic’s a trick when these cities are always the same,
suits suffocating fools and men calling you son, not Sonny—
an alien in their eyes—with black holes for hearts and their ears
stuffed with corn, that slop discreet folks covet for colorless meals,
when earthlings turn on machines to distract them from inner space.
(*Sun Ra (born Herman Poole Blount) was an American jazz composer, bandleader, piano and synthesizer player, poet and philosopher known for his experimental music, “cosmic philosophy”, prolific output, and theatrical performances. Born and raised in Alabama, Blount would eventually become involved in the 1940s Chicago jazz scene. He soon abandoned his birth name, taking the name Sun Ra (after Ra, the Egyptian God of the Sun) and developing a complex persona and mythology that would make him a pioneer of Afrofuturism: he claimed he was an alien from Saturn on a mission to preach peace, and throughout his life he consistently denied any ties to his prior identity.)
