Baraka Inscape

A New Poem by Roberto Tejada

April 12, 2017  By Roberto Tejada
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Baraka Inscape

 

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Not so for my republic nothing left of rule
Nothing left of rule over the salvage self

 

by way of weapon to sing in sovereign song
no more composed in courage than most

 

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No more than most myself save nothing is
befitting the field with as many futile

 

stockpiles of opinion so moved to moving
with derision or memory’s abortive

 

little heap after what I did to injury
Rooms still cold with the stroke of it

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Still wreckage a resource like flesh
imputing fingers or lips I made stiller

 

unavailing even to eager asymmetries
of white where I am when I refute

 

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in the kill zone altered of melodic lines
White in August heap’s disintegrated glass

 

volcanic at the skeleton edge of that
pernicious unfiltered little self emphatic

 

for Baraka’s Dusk for Duncan’s Throat
for an advent in mind for the kinfolk

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meant by all in the derogative mob
in land-locked earth in antipodes

 

in eyes-wide noncombatant number
in clay and kiln, in day and bone

 

in name an ‘eruption of a counterform
in the closed field of white definition’

 




Roberto Tejada
Roberto Tejada
Roberto Tejada is the author of poetry collections that include Full Foreground (Arizona, 2012), Exposition Park (Wesleyan, 2010) and Mirrors for Gold (Krupskaya, 2006). Todo en el agora (Libros Magenta, 2015) features selected poems translated into Spanish by poets Alfonso D’Aquino, Gabriel Bernal Granados, and Omar Pérez. He founded and co-edited the journal Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas, a multilingual annual of poetry and translation (1991-2014), and is the author of art histories that include National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (Minnesota, 2009); a monograph on pioneering Mexican-American conceptual artist Celia Alvarez Muñoz (Minnesota, 2009), and such catalog essays as Los Angeles Snapshots in Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980 (Hammer Museum, 2011). He is faculty in the Creative Writing Program and Art History Department at the University of Houston.








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