When I was doing the research for this volume here called
"African-American Literature," which is a textbook,
which first time I've done anything like that came out last
year and seems to be doing quite well.
I made a discovery.
I don't know how this had eluded me before some of you out there
probably already know this.
But I found out that the first ship
bringing in a commercial load of slaves in the Boston Harbor,
when the slave-- that kicked off the American slave trade
and North American slave trade in 1638 was named "Desire."
And I was-- poet runs across something like that
and you say, well, I have to.
I got to write something about that.
And I was looking for an epigraph to frame it
and I couldn't find one, so I had
to quote myself from the introduction to that book
African-American Literature.
Says, quote: "As for the New England slave trade, which
along with rum and opium turned the kind of get
rich quick profits in its day that international drug
trafficking does now--
that industry would not be launched until 1638,
when the first Africans arrived in Boston on the slave ship
Desire."
The Slave Ship Desire.
Human cargo is what we're talking here,
a boat piled high, groaning in fact
beneath the strain of expectation factored in.
On board, stuff hogged up space turned soon to be.
Straight ahead and bright the salt sweet taste
of sweat and sacrifice, you couldn't spit it out.
Like opium, gold, and rum, like land
enough to grow bigger eyes than food gone belly up,
the money's there.
Like sugar or tobacco, crack cash crops then
as now like coal, September wheat, October
cocoa like unlit pork bellies, like Jesus crossed with sex
and shoot em ups like Anglo, Franco, Banco American futures.
Desire, the boat, the streetcars still to come.
Where human beings walk, cross roads
get jammed, get all tied up.
Whoever blocks escape routes gets locked in too.
No exit signs shine just fine in the dark and anger glows.
Picture a boat that crowds you, oversize a load of woe
there is no way around, a slave ship named "Desire."