Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:
Yesterday marked the assassination of Malcolm X, at age 39, on February 21, 1965. In the words of Robert Hayden, Malcolm X “became/much more than there was time for him to be,” and his death inspired many to write poems in his honor, including Gwendolyn Brooks (“He had the hawk-man’s eyes./ We gasped. We saw the maleness./ The maleness raking out and making guttural the air/ And pushing us to walls,”), and Margaret Walker, whose debut collection For My People, was selected by Stephen Vincent Benét in 1942 as winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize.
A new volume of Walker’s poetry, This is My Century: New and Selected Poems has recently been published by the University of Georgia Press, with a moving introduction by Nikky Finney, winner of the 2011 National Book Award for her collection Head Off & Split. (You can watch Finney give a stirring reading of Walker’s poetry here.) Our poem for today is Walker’s tribute to Malcolm X, included in This is My Century.
“For Malcolm X” by Margaret Walker:
All you violated ones with gentle hearts;
You violent dreamers whose cries shout heartbreak;
Whose voices echo clamors of our cool capers,
And whose black faces have hollowed pits for eyes.
All you gambling sons and hooked children and bowery
bums
Hating white devils and black bourgeoisie,
Thumbing your noses at your burning red suns,
Gather round this coffin and mourn your dying swan.
Snow-white moslem head-dress around a dead black face!Beautiful were your sand-papering words against our skins!
Our blood and water pour from your flowing wounds.
You have cut open our breasts and dug scalpels in our
brains.
When and Where will another come to take your holy place?
Old man mumbling in his dotage, or crying child, unborn?
(From This is My Century: New and Collected Poems by Margaret Walker © by Margaret Walker Alexander. Reprinted by kind permission of the University of Georgia Press. Photo of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, March 26, 1964, from the United States Library of Congress‘s Prints and Photographs division via Wikimedia Commons)
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