For Jupitor

Jupitor Hammond was one the first black poets and I owe a debt of gratitude to him as do many other black writers, musicians and artists. His birthday was October 17th 1711 making him three hundred.


I dedicate this day to Jupitor
Whose rings words true
Against the throne of Lucifer
Redemption by thine holy words

Authoring salvation
Addressing Negro subjugation
Precious thy bloody ink spilled for human rights
Like a great red spot, that you did write

Io, Wheatley's Ode to Neptune
You are no satellite
O heavenly son of harp tunes
You are the Apollo of our people's plight
Unaffected by Middle Passage tides

Helios, how you have healed us
Sol, even as you have been sold
Your body chained, they cannot claim your soul
Your sole possession, faith, you soldier on
Soles bonded those influenced by your writing when you speak of our common bonds
Sun of Suns, Hammond Hyperion

You did not planet
Yet you have spun the revolution
Your shadow looms large
Looms of destiny your charge
To span the scale of your importance
One would have to see your pen stroke on millions of portraits

As William Wells Brown's tales
Of the daughter of both Sun and Shade
From Hemmings and Jefferson made
Blessed by Mother Venus's love and Mars' hypocrisy prevailed
Her travails through the cosmos
Clotel as Persephone, her people burn in more than effigy
Black and white and on most surfaces
Surface sentient discrimination
Emptiness, where thousands of wrongs never see illumination
In nebulous nebula, whisked away by Poseidon's Potomac phalange
A life ended rather than suffer enslavement

Les premiers rayons de l’aurore blanchissaient à peine la cime noire
N’ était pas une de ces femmes qui vendent leur amour
Flux, n’avait qu’une petite rivière à traverser pour se trouver au milieu de ces forêts épaisses qui semblent étreindre le nouveau-pays
L'plume parle… vous n’avez qu’un mot à dire… un seul… et elle vivra.
Car il avait soulevé le voile qui cachait le crime de son maître
Et il a change le mulatre a maître
Notre frère de la lune de Jupitor

A Titan of abolition
Your bondage by gravity
Is like your predecessor Jupitor, tied to improbable mission
Freeing minds from prejudiced savagery

Brother Frederick
you have liberated minds from racist rhetoric
You're freedom, freed 'em
Never letting your language languish
Making hopelessness and anguish
Hopefulness sanguine

You have done us a service
Inspired by you, W.E.B Du Bois brought purpose
Lifting a weight on the Souls of Black Folk
You took that yoke
And bore it like a Southern Cross
Advancing your cause
Like a dancing constellation, onward for your people

Marcus,
Our national hero leading our people like Spartacus
No national boundaries where Negros are bound to victims of exploitation
No Solar system can truly shine in subjugation
Appropriation of our proper location
One God, One Aim, One Destination
The perigee, an apogee towards the Mother Earth land
Equality not based on pedigree
A zenith, as Jupitor views its Black Star's circumnavigation

Ganymede, so distant
That'll be the day when you grace all visions
An Invisible Man
Indivisible in that truth is light and light is truth
Reinhart, the paint you fabricate is proof
That Ellison's intelligence in crafting the surreal
The elegance with which he put forth the suffering unseen condition of an unseen existence
The life of a stellar obscurity in a galaxy of bigots

Callisto
Brought to bear this blessing viewed as curse
Two types of prejudice
O Baldwin, still you thirst
To Tell It On The Mountain
Birthing your freedom with streams of social consciousness from ink fountains

The Negro Speaks of Rivers
At the descendents of Zeus's insistence
Langston brought down from Olympus
Hues, soil-shaded as sediment
Fertile sentiments
Cresentic, the words that have grown deep
From Jupitor, we have known them
Black still speak to thee in tribute
Inkwell tributaries that think well literary
Golden, the setting son of giants proficiencies
Stars as beautiful as onyx eyes

Energized, I have ridden on their shoulders, as they rode on yours
Thousands of Miles have you paved
Railroad tiles for Coltrane, laid
An inter temporal, interplanetary muse
Jupitor, you meant to make music
And still you do in the hearts
Of free blacks removed shackles
Your tabernacle, vernacular did part

Linking poet King and X-factor
Martin and Malcolm, would never changed outcomes
Without the will to shout
The words of heaven from mahogany mouths
Their sacrifice tantamount to your speeches
Tigris and Euphrates
Pious in phrasing
You and Grandma Moses' destinies tied for delivering us from Hades
The three headed, gatekeeper and the the river Styx

As well as the Nile
We make no denial that your revolution will not be televised
But from your pieces
Many men intelligized
Gil Scott, hearing your speeches
First in flight
Orbit the knights to make a brighter day
I think I'll call it morning
Ooh child we may feel lost in the fey field of universe
Like Mayfield we must use a verse
Pushing toward our emancipation when we use a verse

Mental slavery, you helped free minds
Jupitor Hammond
Rest in peace of mind
That cogent pieces flowing from your mind
Have been mined and turned like so many rivers, to freedom lines