Sapphire Us
Sometimes I paint.
Does Sonia Sanchez paint? The window pane
Inflamed by the sun’s arms reaching in, pain-
Ful at such a green hour. Hours pass
Our bodies. Undulating and crafting
Reasons not to stay. Trapping shadows in yesterdays.
Peter pan. Poor man. I wonder what
It would be like to walk the walk
Without a translucent friend of incandescence
Under our bodies. Martin Luther King Jr.’s shadow bled
Black. The same as him. I bet.
I bet a saxophone’s shadow bleeds blue
And breathes indigo too and catches the gold,
Dripping notes of its friend, the saxophone,
And feeds them to ours. Our hours
Here are not long. But our hours are ours.
And my daddy loves Johnny Coltrane
And for some reason also loves windows
Because they’re mostly squares.
But I’m not so sure he can say the same about jails.
***