photo credit: Maury Landsman

Reclaimed Names

A running epigraph of names

Cumulus

We fictionalize ourselves to actualize ourselves

Isabella Baumfree became Sojourner Truth        

Ras Taf(f)ari Makonnen became Emperor Haile Sellassie        

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna became Che Guevara        

Dairies can’t hold secrets any better

Than siblings or friends but

We write as if no one will read it

Rewrite until we can’t tell who wrote it

Create out of desperation

There’s a line in the sand

That needs to be crossed

Wesley Cook became Mumia Abu-Jamal

When others ask

Say no

Short

Quickly

So they don’t believe

Cumulus like a storm is approaching

Samuel Langhorne Clemens became Mark Twain

Thomas Lanier Williams became Tennessee Williams

Abraham Stoker became Bram Stoker        

James Otis Lanier became J. Otis Powell‽

Few saw molting flesh

In a trail behind footfalls

They saw only fault in freedom    

Fannie Ruth Jackson became Aquanetta

Jo Bobby Johnson became Adamas  

Prince Rogers Nelson

Formally Known As Prince

Then known as Prince again

Knowing is by colors of rage

A trajectory through a transblusent miasma

Of his-story

Moving like climate change through time and space

GLORIA JEAN WATKINS became bell hooks

Charlie Parker became Yardbird

Chloe Anthony Wofford became Toni Morrison

Herman Sonny Blout became SUN RA 

Transmogrified by atavistic souls through

Disconnection from body  

Names from mother tongue

Improvising as a ways of knowing

Reconstructing stories

Recreating eternal metaphors

Brutish aggression left holes

Where culture used to be

Improvisations facilitate stories from

The amnesia that sickens society

Little wonder the price of liberation included the sacrifice

Of names and functional identity

Shaped into hammers pounding against ethos

Of circumstances with a blues dense as concrete

Cumulus turning grey 

Marguerite Johnson became Maya Angelou

James Willie Brown, Jr. became Yusef Komunyakaa

Anna Marie Wooldridge became Abbey Lincoln

Malcolm Little became Malcolm X

Then El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz

LeRoi Jones became Imamu Amiri Baraka

Stories flood rivers remembering land

They used to cover

Remembering knowledge of where they once flowed

Freely