I am quite blessed and honored to serve as an AP Reader for College Board’s AP English Literature Exam now five summers in a row, and to celebrate our last reading in Louisville, Kentucky, I read two pieces from Love You Madly: Poetry about Jazz, edited by Lisa Alvarado. Here is one of the three pieces I wrote for Love You Madly Poetry, inspired by the legendary Hugh Masekela, who gave me a most perfect gift, my name.
Mahlalela (Lazy Bones)
There is no laziness in those bones.
Music is the symbiotic marriage of math and science
to passion and sound, birthing life, melody and drum
but no work of art is that simple.
Exile a man because he protests with a flugelhorn and prod him out at gun’s barrel,
amidst an ebullition of homestead and singeing flesh, and thwart him westward,
much like the fathers before him. He does not respond in kind,
but riffs on his clarion, “Mahlalela,” lazy bones, as Letta rubs their noses in it.
Rob a country of her griots and the callers will muster like Malcolm and MacDuff,
amassing millions, nations even, firing lyric and melody, chanting “Amandla!,[1]”
while Makeba, Masekela, Mbulu and Semenya, turn the studio into the war room
and dismantle the Boer bear from distant waters rallying, “Idlozi livukile! Masibuyel’ emakhaya![2]”
No lazy bones in this anthem and victory march song.
Its cadence proud and contagious, its timbre too bright and confident,
fully assured of the perfect, long suffering truth that neither life nor land
has been lost in vain,
and that freedom yet comes.
© Asani Charles
[1] Power
[2] The spirits of our ancestors have awakened! Let’s return home!
Life in Print 