This week, Ray’s poems meditate on God, religion, and race, and the ways in which God and religion are leveraged as weapons against particular races.
Nativity
William Carlos Williams
tried to write an accurate
history of the Americas.
It began with acclimation
of Christ but soon lagged
from the inured inhabitants.
The beginning is always
hard to discuss precluded
by the fact that beginnings
are very nearly always
irrelevant to the gross wine
that invests itself throughout
the story. My story resides
in the writing of untenable
tracks of land laid unnamed,
then fenced and source
claimed. In my homelands
there is The Great Lake,
not few. Scenes of victimed
land espouse the right
to remembering. I can’t
remember when Christ
was conceived within me
but since then it has been
the writhing unwriting
of a beginning in which I
was drunk on the idea of
becoming myself. It is
not for me to say. It is not
for me to say. But who?
Praised Conclusions II
These are my tiny receipts for
the soft devotionals lettered up,
let loose, invocation framed
against a world that is made
not entirely by hand but also
by the unspeaking inhabitants.
It is the sift in jutting cosmics
poured out after the holy prayer
makes a meek-faced appearance
and, reeled in clear assurance,
says what a world might mean.
This is not such a simple thing
unless it be in the matter of all
minds working against violence.
We enter the mosque in order
to divine the truth with those
under the weight of thought
in deviating gasp of branches.
It is to make the world neat
in hopes that it will unfold
from a compendium which
flourishes rich with voices
arching towards a sky filled
with reminders of holiness.
To touch a withering husk
and make it fit for the world,
I would lay out chalked palms
in genuflection, turning this
dirt as though the earth sat
neatly in little calcifications.
White Conclusions
The white mask placed
over God leers without
hesitation. They compile
a false visage, not the face
but a shape forming lines
from the sheering of soft
fabric. The image of souls
are misapprehensions of
holiness. The sentimental blot
He deems righteousness, is
clean, driving into being
our beings, to be himself,
masks want to be immaculate,
tell me I am an imitation.
Tell me I am a simplicity.
Clouds trimmed in white
gouache do not imply rain.
The moisture made print
of health on the earth is
not made from whiteness.
God is not white, not man.
Do you not feel a tearing
of deception when the sky
leaks, is lightening and
thunder. It is vanishment.
It is the clang of echolalia.
I would rather exclude the
lie that is white and barren,
not in echolalia, until I can
find the image to save myself.
Gloaming
I thought there was something
special about every gloaming.
When I thought I would go back
to prison it was gloaming, a calm,
I repeated to me. I did it no justice
and believed that I couldn’t
deserve imprisonment. Fate
seemed to align my freedom
with my ritualistic viewing
of gloaming. It was my white-
ness. I was not lucky and
if I called it God I would be
denying humanity. To a vast
fray of people, experience, this
is the experience of whiteness.
A friend, after my release,
jokingly told me I was woke.
But gloaming is not white.
It is that eye-burning-blue
rimmed by the welfare of fade
where I am kept, myself, safe
in sky. Think of the fate of fake
sin. I turned myself into the cops
and wasn’t beaten or murdered
in cold blood. But what stopped
my devotionals of false dusk
was a woman, 8-months along,
violated by the stone bench
she was resting on. She spoke
to me in a bitter-sad-taught
humour, was resolved to say
the fact that will always win
custody of self in jail. Hymn.
“Imagine a universe in which
everything they tell you is a lie.”
