Poetry Friday: The Shine of Sapphire

November 19, 2009 by Women's Voices For Change

Before all the buzz dies down around the already laureled film Precious, we thought we’d stay in the glow of the creator of its title character, the poet and educator known as Sapphire. Your editor met her around 2001 as a fellow member of The Writers Room in Greenwich Village, years after we read her incendiary novel PUSH (upon which the film, starring Gabourey Sidibe in the title role, is based). By then her poetry collection American Dreams had been cited by Publisher’s Weekly as “one of the strongest debut collections of the ’90s,” and she had just published Black Wings & Blind Angels, of which a publisher’s excerpt is below. Of that book, Poet’s & Writer’s Magazine wrote: “With her soul on the line in each verse, her latest collection, Black Wings & Blind Angels, retains Sapphire’s incendiary power to win hearts and singe minds.”

Sapphire’s work has been translated into 11 languages and has been adapted for stage in the United States, Great Britain, France and the Netherlands. She has performed her work at the Nuyorican Poet’s Café, Franklin Furnace, the Bowery Poetry Club, Literaturwerkstadt in Berlin and Apples & Snakes in London. Her poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in The Black Scholar, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Spin, The Black Scholar and Bomb. She has taught literature, fiction and poetry workshops at SUNY Purchase, Trinity College and the Writer’s Voice in New York City, and taught/mentored graduate MFA students at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Brooklyn College and at her current faculty posting, the New School University. In 1990 she received an Outstanding Achievement in Teaching Award from Joyce Dinkins, then First Lady of New York City, for her work with literacy students in Harlem and the Bronx.

It’s been fun, this fall, hearing Sapphire’s interviews on radio and TV (see her interview with Katie Couric at the bottom of this post), and knowing that all the controversies swirling around the film are both familiar to her and completely irrelevant to the story she wove from the voices of her students in those literacy classes. The voices below are quite different, which makes sense: As with all good poets, Sapphire contains multitudes.

From Black Wings and Blind Angels:

Breaking Karma #5

i

It is like a scene in a play.
His bald spot shines upward between dark tufts of hair.
We are sitting in a pool of light on the plastic
covered couch, Ernestine, his last live-in,
ended up with. But that is the end.
We are sitting in the beginning of our lives now
looking at our father upright in his black
reclining chair. It’s four of us then, children,
new to Los Angeles–drugs, sex, Watts burning,
Aretha, Michael Jackson, the murder of King,
haven’t happened yet.
He is explaining how things will be–
Which one will cook, which one will clean.
“Your mama,” he announces, “is not coming.”
Two thousand miles away in the yellow
linoleum light of her kitchen, my mother
is sitting in the easy tan-colored man’s lap.
Kissing him. Her perfect legs golden like
whiskey, his white shirt rolled up arms that
surround her like the smell of cake baking.
“Forget about her,” my father’s voice drops like
a curtain, “she doesn’t want you. She never did.”

ii

Holding the photograph by its serrated edges, staring,
I know the dark grey of her lips is “Jubilee Red”
her face brown silk. I start with the slick
corner of the photograph, put it in my mouth like it’s
pizza or something. I close my eyes, chew, swallow.

“Breaking Karma #6″

I’m in the movies now playing the part
of the girl who broke my heart.
My mouth, strobe-light pink, bounces off blue sequins.
Behind me the Stones sing “Miss You,” hollering,
“There’s some Puerto Rican girls around the corner
just dying to meet chu.”
In the wings a white boy in a wheelchair moans,
“Oh operator please get straight.”
SHE takes the stage now. Big yella gal.
Daddy was a wop. Mama was a nigger.
She’s a singer. With a voice hot semi-liquid rock.
Her heels are hills, cobalt blue melting like
her dress into the firm breasts, fat hips & belly
of Black Los Angeles.
“Let’s burn down the corn field,” SHE wails.
It’s 1968. Tito, Michael, Randy & Cato
are dancing down rows of rainbow colored corn
when a voice comes over the loud speaker:
There will be no ambulances tonight.
“We’ll make love, we’ll make love while it burns,”
SHE screams like Howlin’ Wolf, like Jay Hawkins,
like Hank Williams, like Van Gogh’s windmill,
like the severed ear of black wind in a plate
of pigtails & pink beans,

like that bridge in Connecticut that collapsed
under the center of air shaking like
change in a cup.
SHE stands like the big legs of a nuclear plant
cracked at the base melting down a room full
of $3/hr assembly line workers who hear her
& shout, “Honey Hush!” & the crack in their
mother’s back becomes a sidewalk, then a road
leading to a peach tree in “Georgy”
or a pear tree in Florida.
I’m eating popcorn & watching a Mexican
dump a drunk paraplegic BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY
in the desert his granddad rolled over
a century ago killing for gold.
At the side of the road an Okie girl,
selling peanuts & semiprecious gems,
hands me three pieces of black obsidian,
called “Apache Tears,” the Okie girl drawls,
“’cause after the cavalry massacred their men,
the Native women cried so hard
their tears turned black, then to stone.”
Inside the theater the screen fills up
with a fat half breed burning, gasoline
in a blue dress. SHE picks up a

microphone & in a book she hasn’t read yet
a white boy in a rented room puts
his eyes out with lye. “I rather!” SHE shouts.
“Tell it!” the audience shouts back. “Umm hmm,”
like the wind trapped in a slave castle SHE moans,
“I rather go blind,” the screen melts white
drips down her face & disappears,
“than see you–”