About Us
Published in the September 1969 issue of Negro Digest/Black World, ‘Tombs’ by Richard Walter Thomas, a Black radical poet, came off the heels of a Civil Rights Movement experiencing considerable turmoil. Malcolm X had been assassinated in 1965. The Black Panther Party was then founded in ‘66. Detroit later went up in flames in July ‘67. Shortly after, MLK Jr. was assassinated in ‘68, stirring the entire country–over 100 cities–into upheaval. Black Power as a political movement was more actively entering the stage, partially displacing the more established liberal civil rights struggle. ‘Tombs’ was written in light of that unrest.
Tombs by Richard W. Thomas
There are reasons
why we burn our tombs.
Tombs you
rent to us
for the sun
of the apple of
our labor
for
that stuff of our sweat, vaporized.
Hip Holy Communion?
From your
elevated soundproof gardens,
where silence roars, and
pretty smiles live in
exile on some island
in the face. Tombs,
you hired us into; colonies
of fast young sweet
black things
eyeing you approaching
in huge hunting boots, cradling
The Iron Ritual. A bag
of dirty coins, slayer of their
Fathers.
While drop by drop
the acid of your noiseless
devices burns down to
bone whiteness, our skulls.
We cannot feel ourselves.
Gone dead inside, the wires
twist and snap. We
Go out. Black swells the space
where farmers used the hope,
Sun, Rain, the slanted hill
of Bones of pretty Black
Things gone up in smoke
(They could always dance on air.)
you
visit the tombs
only when our revolting
screams
disturb the floating cherries
in your cocktails.
Tombs,
you milk,
fattening mental hogs
eating your eyeballs.
But, from our burning tombs,
we catch a quick glance
of a Horizon
our tombs had
always
Overshadowed.
So, like tombs,
at the edge of walls
bordering your soundproof gardens.
Through hundred years thick
plate glass
on your torture rack, we gesture.
Our faces turn into insults
by their motions and play on
words, by their weapons.
Forced underground, we tug
at nerve endings dangling from
surfaces patrolled
by Christ figures who
Pack their hills in their watch
pockets.
We sang
the song of tombs: clapping tombs,
hurling, spitting tombs,
dying tombs, cussing tombs (shooting tombs)
Drops of
tombs pouring out our bodies,
in search of the central orbit
held captive in a dream when
the dreamers copped out.
Piles of tombs
leaping at the
sun’s exposed white neck (but it
was at night and the moon got
in the way)
growing,
growing, until
only a small ray
of evening sunlight
which had gathered stuff
from our songs,
stumbling, cussin’ and carryin’ on
blowing puffs of poisonous energies
into the eyeballs
of the defenders,
your cracked
soundproof garden walls
and with our tombs’ screams
Sank your floating cherry!
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