Truth Thomas is a singer-songwriter, poet, and photographer, born in Knoxville, Tennessee and raised in Washington, DC (the Capitol recording artist once known as Glenn Edward Thomas). He is the founder of Cherry Castle Publishing and studied creative writing at Howard University under Dr. Tony Medina. Thomas earned his MFA in poetry at New England College. His collections include Party of Black, A Day of Presence, Bottle of Life, and Speak Water, winner of the 2013 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry. He is a former Writer-in-Residence for the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society (HoCoPoLitSo) and the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Howard County, Maryland. His poems have appeared in over 150 publications, including The 100 Best African American Poems (edited by Nikki Giovanni) and This Is the Honey (edited by Kwame Alexander). He is the creator of the Skinny poetry form and Editor-in-Chief of The Skinny Poetry Journal.
NASSER HOSPITAL | 2023
1.
Candy in the palm
of a little girl’s hand
falls to blood-soaked
floor. After her gasping
becomes cooling board
sleep, only the mortuary
is awake.
2.
In the emergency room,
a father makes swaddling
clothes of white sheets
frayed by faith in war.
Cradling his daughter’s
stillness in the cocoon
of this fabric, his left arm
is king of pillows.
If this were bedtime for
the living, lullabies
would spread their
blanket songs.
3.
In the emergency room,
this same father
uses the index finger
of his right hand
to wipe away caking
of blood, orange-tinted
with tears, from hematomas
just above his baby’s
brows. He kisses the paleness
of her eyelids—never again
to know blinking. Before
she is zipped up in a black
plastic bag, carried away
to the cemetery, tell me,
which of their faces is
more the tombstone?
Tell me.
THE BODY IS A TRUMPET
when ballot box music plays, though you might say, “So what?”
for voting baffles baffle, and plungers of the Confederacy still seek
to mute the bells of our brass. Why press a single valve, alleging
freedom, I hear your bandstands ask me. And I cannot tell you
why. But I know a seamstress once graced a first chair, making
justice tempos dizzy, improvising through “I Shall Not Be Moved”
chord changes—and when Medgar, marching courage double
time, birthed his voter registration cool, though murder—tone
deaf murder—fired a Klansman through his back, other hands
picked up the metal of his fallen Martin Committee and wailed—
their sound, arms against a sea of skin color troubles. I cannot
tell you why, after Fannie Lou's clarion blew in the Mississippi
civil rights opus, all her jailhouse dates were loaded blackjack
measures, kick drum hammers on her ruptured spleen and kidneys;
even sweat of torture grew weary of its Whap Whap Whaps
in Winona 6 & 3—or was it yesterday in Palestine—when it
dripped its salty stings into swelling arrangements of a woman's
cries. No, I cannot say how exactly, after her left eye became
a heavy bag filled with partial blindness from a nation’s hip-thrown
blows, she never missed a note on any election day recording. All
I can tell you is her body was a trumpet, and her bludgeoning
got sick and tired of silence.
FOR ALL THE DECIDUOUS PICTURES
Where trees grow branches, Afro-puffed with green,
though Hawk's breath of repression strips each limb,
I watch their buds fulfill their pledge to rising,
spring up along the sweet gum path within.
The cold’s a field of locks, like cell block cities—
like icy walls and barbed wire chilling hope,
where beating winds make frost the flesh of cages,
conscripting Arctic leg irons on the soul.
Each snowfall that visits stacks up shivers,
piles forsaken dreams, heavy on the bark,
while whips of blizzards crack, mocking forest faith;
lashings of despair never miss their mark.
Confinement is the cruelest storm that howls,
both through bean slot canopies, cross bar crowns.
When January's ice tests sanity's pluck,
loneliness handcuffs; angst remains unbound.
Yet joy lives in the cells of seeds that climb,
all sap that slows, but never freezing yields.
I know knife-tip seasons cut like Glasgow smiles,
and some would count us deadwood in the fields.
Though glacial days incarcerate this timber,
rebirth cannot be vanquished from the grove.
No winter can detain the roots of spirits
or leaves of freedom when the mind unfolds.