Melba Joyce Boyd in front of Maccabees Building on Wayne State University Campus Photo: Douglass Davis
Melba Joyce Boyd
Poems
A native Detroiter, Dr. Melba Joyce Boyd is an award-winning author or editor of 13 books and over 100 essays on African American literature, film and culture. Nine of her books are poetry; her latest collection, Death Dance of a Butterfly (Past Tents Press, 2013) received the 2013 Library of Michigan Notable Books Award for Poetry. She is the author of “This Museum Was Once a Dream,” the official poem for the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, which is engraved in the museum wall. She has read her poetry at universities and cultural institutions throughout the U.S. and Europe, and her poetry has been translated into German, Italian, Spanish and French.
Boyd is a Distinguished Professor in African American Studies at Wayne State University in Detroit, and an Adjunct Professor in Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan—Ann Arbor. She has held professorial positions at the University of Iowa, Ohio State University, was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Bremen in Germany, and Visiting Professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, Republic of China.
She is also a documentary filmmaker: The Black Unicorn: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press, and co-producer of Star by Star: The Poetry and Publishing of Naomi Long Madgett. Boyd’s poetry, essays and creative nonfiction have appeared in anthologies, academic journals, cultural periodicals and newspapers in the United States and Europe.
Roses and Revolutions: The Selected Writings of Dudley Randall received the 2010 Independent Publishers Award, the 2010 Library of Michigan Notable Books Award for Poetry, and was a Finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Poetry and the ForeWord Award for Poetry. Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press received the 2004 Honor for Nonfiction from The Black Caucus of the American Library Association.
To listen to Melba J. Boyd read her poems, please click on the audio player that appears above each text.
The Bass Is Woman
for Marion Hayden
At a left-
angled tilt,
adjacent to
her throat,
Marion mind-
melds with this
magnificent
instrument.
Lithe, swift
fingers
restringing
eighth notes
in cut time
against
bare-knuckle
restraints
releasing stress
from neck
past breasts
through a
navel leading
into a womb
gifting violet
riffs like sweet
rose water
brimming inside
uninhibited
thick hips
that swing
and sway,
dancing on
ripples of
unreachable
prayers.
Her brown
curves ground
earth tones
at the base
of rhythm—
the back-
bone of song.
The bass
is woman.
Tecumseh Dispelling Thunder Clouds
for Marion Ford Thomas
Wise women
fulfill futures,
water gardens,
design quilts
woven with laughter
and mysteries
that warm baby cribs
while mapping starlight
through hostile domains
for alternative lives.
Marion Tecumseh
is a peacemaker,
discrete, intelligent,
graceful and petite.
She adorns her
classrooms with
insight, compassion
and courage to
uphold truth,
like Tecumseh
dispelling thunder
clouds threatening
blue skies her
children fill with
songs and paintings
of mosaic designs
contoured with
sunsets and
earth tones.
We live in her life,
fill our fingers
with her prayers
and incisive perspective,
enhancing what she
already realized
as we learn
what to
understand.
Crystallizing the Moon
for Mick Vranich
When the blues
follows your steps,
poetry lines
are as deliberate
as wiping blood off
a union contract,
declensions as
foreboding as
the howl of blood-
hounds tracking
radicals like criminals
stealing freedom
after midnight.
Mick could find a lilt
in this pathos,
he could rock a poem
about hard knocks
in Detroit,
like a siren protesting
murdered dreams,
like listening
to guitar hymns
resonating on
the underbelly
of saxophones
soaked in funky
beer notes
rising above the
Cass Corridor.
or,
like watching
the blues,
crystallizing
the moon.
We Want Our City Back
We want our city back.
We want our streetlights on.
We want our garbage gone.
We want our children
playing on playgrounds,
but not with loaded guns.
We want to retire
by the river
and raise collard greens
in abandoned fields.
We want our ancestors
to rest in peace.
We want our city back.
We don't want law and order.
We want justice and jobs.
We don't want small business.
We mean serious business.
No more Mom and Pop wig shops.
No more Mickey D's
rappin’ with the homies.
No more Dollar Stores
We need groceries.
No more Dixie Colonels
serving Kente cloth cuisine.
No more taco supreme.
No more indigestion or
quick-fix politics.
We want our city back.
We don't want police
harassing the homeless
for being without a lease.
We don't want video cops
bustin’ crack heads
with flashlights at night.
We want peacekeepers
to capture the real dope men
reclining in respectable privilege.
We want our taxes to track
down the real assassins.
We want our city back.
We don't want Euro-centric
or Afro-eccentric educations.
We want a freedom curriculum.
We want a liberated vision
in history remembered.
We don't want our children
crunched like computer chips
to fit in the old world order,
worshiping slave holding
societies in Egypt or Greece.
We want the board of education
to take a lie detector test
for neglect of the intellect,
for assault on our children's senses.
We don't want them to be GM execs,
or rejects in labor camps.
We want dignity,
not cupidity.
We want our city back.
No more text-sex mess.
No more zoot-suit mayors,
shuffling skeletons and abuses
like gamblers losing pay checks.
No more ex-basketball,
suburban, bing-a-ling mayors,
ignoring inner city citizens
living next to boarded-up
doors and bolted windows.
No more broken trees.
No more motor city casinos,
or dilapidated buildings
where junkies, rodents
and vermin spring.
We want our city back.
We want the river dredged
for distraught souls.
We want our homes rebuilt.
We want the guilty
to pay a greed tax
for the living they stole.
No more poison water.
No more Republican
managers who emerge
but cannot see.
We want our city back.
We want out country back,
from this Rebirth
of a Racist Nation,
from a man who
shakes hands with
the Ku Klux Klan,
reversing religious
freedom,
and deporting people
God painted tan.
Hey! We ain't going away
like fugitives slaves
escaping to Canaday!
Our backs are up
against the wall.
This is our clarion call.
Feed the hungry.
Clothe the ragged.
Heal the sick.
Enlighten the ignorant.
Punish the wicked.
And raise the dead!
We want our streetlights on.
We want our garbage gone.
We want to be rid
of smack and crack.
We want to retire
by the river.
We want our ancestors
to rest in peace.
We are claiming our history,
seizing the hour.
Cause, we mean to take
our city and our country back.
