Thank you.
It's good to be back to this, my other home.
I'm going to start out with a love poem.
And I decided to, we were talking at dinner,
and Washington DC seems to come up a lot.
It always has for my people and for all of us.
And so Washington DC figures prominently in this poem.
It's called "The Myth of Blackbirds".
"The hours we counted precious were blackbirds
in the density of Washington.
Taxis toured the labyrinth with passengers of mist
as the myth of ancient love took the shape of two figures,
carrying the dawn tenderly on their shoulders
to the shores of the Potomac.
We fled the drama of lit marble and the capital
for a refuge held up by sweet everlasting Earth.
The man from Ghana who wheeled our bags
was lonesome for his homeland.
But commerce made it necessary to carry someone else's
burdens.
The stars told me how to find us in this disorder of systems.
Washington did not ever sleep that night
in the sequence of eternal nights.
There were worrying calculators, computers stealing names,
while spirits of the disappeared drank coffee at an all night
cafe in this city of disturbed relativity.
Justice is a story by heart in the beloved country where
imagination weeps.
The sacred mountains only appear to be asleep.
When we finally found a room in the hall of mirrors
and shut the door, I could no longer
bear the beauty of scarlet licked
with yellow on the wings of blackbirds.
This is the world in which we undress together.
Within it, white deer intersect with the wisdom
of the hunter of grace.
Horses wheel toward the morning star.
Memory was always more than paper and cannot be broken
by violent history or stolen by thieves of childhood.
We cannot be separated in this loop of mystery between
blackbirds and the memory of blackbirds.
And in the pre-dawn when we had slept
for centuries in a drenching sweet rain, you touched me.
And the springs of clear water beneath my skin
were new knowledge.
And I loved you in this city of death.
Through the darkness and the sheer rise
of clipped green grass and asphalt,
our ancestors appeared together at the shoreline of the Potomac
in their moccasins and pressed suits of discrete armor.
They go to the water from the cars of smoky trains
or dismount from horses dusty with fatigue.
See the children who became our grandparents, the old women
whose bones fertilize the corn.
They form us in our sleep of exhaustion
as we make our way through this world of skewed justice,
of songs without singers.
I embrace these spirits of relatives
who always return to the place of power,
whatever the outcome in the spiral of beauty.
And I particularly admire the tender construction
of your spine, which in the gentle dawning
is a ladder between the deep in which stars are perfectly
stars and the heavens where we converse with eagles.
I guide your hip home to me with my hand,
which is more than a hand, rather
a river of effervescent water.
And I am thankful to the brutal city for the space which
outlines your limber beauty to the man from Ghana who
loves the poetry of the stars to the ancestors who do not forget
us in this concrete and paper illusion,
to the blackbirds who are more than blackbirds,
and to you, sweetheart, as we make our incredible journey."