Sometimes I Never Suffered by Shane McCrae

Author:Shane McCrae
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

LIMBO

JIM LIMBER BURNING WHERE NO FIRE IS

Such as I’ve been I am I never was

Bad or a good boy ’cept as I was born

Bad like you know the badness in a glass

Of fresh milk if you leave it in the sun

Will be exposed by the blazing inquiry

Bad like the sun won’t make it fresher not

Bad like a white boy’s badness lights the sky

With a strange second sun that dies unnat-

urally from the sky that while it shines

Down on him makes the ground he walks a stage

And when it dies he is himself again

A living Negro never walked a stage

We are the ghosts of who comes after us

And their memorial I bet I was sent

To Limbo ’cause whoever watches was-

n’t sure what good and bad things I had done

But saw the good and bad things millions of

Negroes had done before me on my back

And couldn’t add the figures up and thought

Limbo was good enough and not to dark-

en Heaven darker than Heaven has to be

Or it might be a storm of Negroes in

Heaven I bet whoever watches sees

A storm of Negroes piled high thrashing on

My back whoever watches sees a pile

Of Negroes thinks they’re thrashing ’cause it’s so

Many in one place but the thrashing’s all

The rush of the eye from one black body to

The next and it’s no thrashing in the bod-

ies but the wrong is in the eye I bet

Whoever watches didn’t see I had

A storm of Negroes on my back but it

Was a black cloud like the black clouds I’ve seen

In the far Heaven I’ve seen from Limbo like

The clouds I’ve seen from which I’ve seen stars born

Such storms as are the glory of the dark

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