| WFR POETRY |
| WFR POETRY |
Birth of the Blues
by Beth Brown Preston
Was it Miles Davis’s “Kinda Blue” bringing me home to you?
Or the musical memories of our mutual histories?
Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll laid back and fingering those piano keys,
on an instrument played by Langston Hughes, Bontemps, Zora Neale and Countee Cullen
while Black women danced a close sweating two-step
with their men in Harlem jook joints?
Were the blues born on sultry evenings under canopies of stars?
Come into this world between dark southern thighs
while our enslaved ancestors danced to strumming banjos, wailing mouth harps
and ancient rhythms of violins, tambourines and drums?
Men and women dancing to words become songs:
work songs
praise songs
kin songs to the blues?
Were the blues born with the birth of “The New Negro?”
or “the flowering of Negro literature?” Or were the blues
more hidden, ever more subtle in the eyes and in the voices of Harlem?
In the lyrics of Billie Holiday crooning “Strange Fruit” at Café Society?
Or the crackle of Louis Armstrong’s accent?
or the clarion call of his trumpet?
Was it in the unstoppable Trane: a love supreme flowing from his horn?
or in a Black child’s first giant step?
Black man, my lover, I held your newborn in my arms
wondering just what he would make of this world,
a world he gazed on with sad, irreverent yet innocent brown eyes.
Black man, my lover, do not ask me
how you will survive without the blues.
Beth Brown Preston is a poet and novelist whose work has been recognized twice by the William Carlos Williams Prize of the Academy of American Poets. They are currently a member of the Modern Language Association, the College Language Association, the Poetry Society of America, the Academy of American Poets, the Langston Hughes Society, and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. Their previous poetry collections include “LIGHTYEARS: 1973-1976” and “SATIN TUNNELS.” Their debut novel—“CIRCE’S DAUGHTERS”—is a work of historical literary fiction. They are currently working on a book of literary and scholarly critical essays, a series of short fiction, a memoir, a play, and two new poetry collections: “OXYGEN I” and “OXYGEN II.”