Knight and Brooks

Etheridge Knight spoke poetry in The Essential Etheridge Knight! I mean he grasps those intangible moments and blows sound into them, like the poet he references in his poem "The Sun Came", Gwendolyn Brooks. Both writers tackle an otherwise non tangible yet, a very real force of nature/nurture, the desire to know the truth, what that is, how it differs for you and I and what does it do to me if you don't believe my truth...  you can't deny wanting to physically remove the blind folds off whether it was on you or someone else, after reading these poems. My favorite line in "Truth" by Gwendolyn Brooks is also one that I think best resonates with Knight and his sessions in the shade and the light as I read it, with struggle, imprisonment, empowerment, injustice:
"A session with shade" 
- from Gwendolyn Brooks, "Truth" -->Below

And if sun comes

How shall we greet him?

Shall we not dread him,

Shall we not fear him

After so lengthy a

Session with shade?

Though we have wept for him,

Though we have prayed

All through the night-years--

What if we wake one shimmering morning to

Hear the fierce hammering

Of his firm knuckles

Hard on the door?

Shall we not shudder?--

Shall we not flee

Into the shelter, the dear thick shelter

Of the familiar

Propitious haze?

Sweet is it, sweet is it

To sleep in the coolness

Of snug unawareness.

The dark hangs heavily

 Over the eyes.

I admire the skill in these words.
In "The Sun Came" Knight is calling back his mentor's work and history at the same time.  The truth or sun, depending on which poem you're reading has come, it's out, the miracle happened and now it's gone, passed us by, came and found us not worthy, not aware, not awake...
What lay in-between is distraction and destruction.
And now the Sun has gone, has bled red,

Weeping behind the hills.
Again the night shadows form.
But beneath the placid face a storm rages.
The rays of Red have pierced the deep, have struck The core. We cannot sleep.
The shadows sing: Malcolm, Malcolm, Malcolm. The darkness ain't like before. 

Knight does this playful thing with structures, it seems a theatrical type of poetry, a moving poem. Malcolm, Malcolm, Malcolm, deep core sleep--shadows sing, all of this makes me want to perform his poetry in my family room, no one home of course. 


The Sun came, Miss Brooks.
And we goofed the whole thing.
I think.
(Though ain't no vision visited my cell.) 

This real high emotional stanza filled with despair is like one I found in Knight's "A Fable". 

And so they argued, and to this day they are still in their prison cells, their stomachs / trembling with fear. 

The telling of such large concepts, the coming of the "Truth" and the debate on how to obtain Freedom, being done in 2 or 3 phrases is an amazing work of poetry on the mind. I'm taken so many places in so little words.