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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=392198" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>American of the Century (for Bobcats everywhere...)</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=392198" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">A jackdaw wisdom, tight-lined mouth and hands<br>Fashioned a diamond gift for the burgeoning culture<br>Like an alchemist drawing elements from the soil, but not so base.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=392198" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Borrowing himself from bluesmen, small-town owners of the road, <br>From Rambling Jack, from Whitman, Guthrie, <br>Thomas and Rimbaud. And Macon’s finest too. Out of<br>Deepest Minnesota what would he choose himself to be? <br>The joker of the pack, claiming his slice of pie, <br>Convert-rabbi, neo-prophet, passing evangelist, <br>Unsentimental, unforeseen, unloved romanticist.<br>Wallflower gazer, laser, thrower of small verse grenades, <br>Painting threats of judgement in the mirrors<br>Of the mighty on the stolen hills.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=392198" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">A man too easy to dismiss, if not quite finally – <br>A contradicted, flawed, sometime-misogynist, <br>Ingenue, leaping the book from faith to faith. <br>However, when the time runs down<br>Those around may still recall all faith is one, a range<br>Of many a ledge and foothold. For those who have to climb.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=392198" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Hibbing was once a mining town. Must have had fragments of sharp refrain<br>Floating in the post-war air, around the ears of teens and babes: Ma Rainey, Mahalia, <br>Dock Boggs and Robert Johnson, all of the splendid choir. As the ore ran thin<br>A voice emerged that “could not sing”, against a pounded piano, harp and buzzed guitar.<br>And hit a chord of confluence that five decades would ring. Would seize<br>Its moment in the light of centre stage before an avalanche of dross<br>Would cover it again, but even then, left trace for anyone who cared.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=392198" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Minstrel tunes, quick river songs. Railroad, fly tree, putdown songs, <br>Songs of desire, so numerous and singular that none in that haze century<br>Could interpret their plurality. You didn’t dance<br>And if you had to learn the words, he offered you good luck.<br>No marketplace, no double-track, rolling his stone down a single rail.<br>The first rap: homesick blues. And songs to power brokers <br>From the highways, blacks and jews.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=392198" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">He fanned the flames of heroes, names among the brave: <br>Medger Evers, Emmett Till, Rubin Carter, Davey Moore, <br>George Jackson, Hattie Carroll, Lenny Bruce and Catfish.<br>He unlocked and protested love, that broken-glass illusion of what little<br>Might be saved. The light went down, cold beauty fell away, sensibility<br>Waned. But again it grew with age, thus he<br>Survives today, not castaway, his vinyl digitized.<br>You can check the bins and racks: <br>Data units in the aisles, blood spilt on the tracks.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=392198" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">For you who hire to dull the danger’s edge<br>And promote disgrace of person for commercial gain<br>He must be but a cipher, puffed and lined, a talk-show face<br>Who cannot entertain, nor write a line of “poetry”. But surely he can be<br>Another scripted product to put out on stage.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=392198" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">So how do you explain his undertow of fame? What he became, what is by him defined, <br>The enigmatic resonance that is triggered by his name? He skipped your ropes, <br>Denounced your pride and kept a finger pointing through the mostly wasted times, <br>Observed your game, defined it, clung to his control, his nose and inspiration<br>Clean and scarce and cold.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=392198" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Camelot invaded Cuban dreams. Even Roosevelt, barred the immigrant doors. <br>Reagan sponsored terror on the poor and has his airport now. Nixon<br>And his shonda jew turned Cambodians to stone, until the long<br>Predicted night when war-masters stand naked too. Clinton played <br>The sax at least, while Carter something of his slow train knew.<br> <br>He sure was a contender, although he was no MLK, <br>No Malcolm X, no Ali/Clay - but from his strings and keys there came<br>A steady wind and rain, hard as you knew sometimes, <br>The tears of rage, the grains of sand, the journeys through dark heat, <br>Some element in all his work that anyone could use.<br>Even in his watchtower, Hendrix found some blues.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=392198" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">They must have made a margin note when he broadsided in the Village <br>And declaimed on pawned-off murder at the DC freedom march. <br>They surely didn’t scan the reality rides to Mobile.. Brownsville<br>Nashville.. London, an electric hawk.. Jerusalem and Japan.<br>Distilling lethal verses underground, his hidden basement flooded<br>With the lyric of the hills. Rolling thunder and the never-ending tour<br>With make-up, red bandana, cape and mercury.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=392198" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">OK, his book and movie bombed, close to incomprehensible<br>And perhaps his finest songs were not 10 minutes long, but 2.<br>But he left no profanity, nor gave a real dumb interview.<br>And so they underrated him – managed only just<br>To keep alive and lip-service his name, <br>Until confinement to the hall of fame.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=392198" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">This is a fading empire, where demons are within, and children<br>Unprotected from the false are turned to enmity and sin. Where flaws<br>In atoms of the soul are magnified, so we can hardly see<br>Into our own dark eyes. <br>We’re watching through the rain, by rivers<br>Flowing slow. Taken disappearing – invited to confession, <br>To let the distant thunder waken us again.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=392198" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">And when the buried histories rise and echoes have endured, <br>And the ring of truth proves harder than the medals of disdain, <br>The American of the century, from whom nothing was owed, <br>Will be seen to have delivered on everyone he was.<br>The century? The 21st. In these impending years<br>The answers blowing in the wind will howl around our ears.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=392198" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"></a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=392198" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">August-September 2000</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><a href="http://poems.citatepedia.com/">poem</a> by <strong><a rel="author" href="http://authors.citatepedia.com/by.php?a=Frank+Bana">Frank Bana</a></strong></div>