Etheridge Knight

Etheridge Knight is an African-American poet who follows in the lyrical strain of Walt Whitman's free verse. He was born in prison and spent a good portion of his life in prison. His poems explore "imprisonment as a form of contemporary enslavement and [he] looks for ways in which one can be free despite incarceration." There's a certain connection to Thoreau and how he expressed that they could lock up his body but not his mind.

Simone Cypress shared Knight's very powerful poem, "The Bones of My Father," in our GFS Poetry Out Loud competition. It alludes to the legacy of slavery and how it pervades the lives of African-Americans today, amongst other intriguing allusions to the past. Here, the bones of his father are not dry, lifeless fossils buried deep within the soil. They are paradoxically alive; in fact, the skull of his father "grins" as a sad, and somewhat ghoulish, reminder.

The Bones of My Father By Etheridge Knight

1

There are no dry bones

here in this valley. The skull

of my father grins

at the Mississippi moon

from the bottom

of the Tallahatchie,

the bones of my father

are buried in the mud

of these creeks and brooks that twist

and flow their secrets to the sea.

but the wind sings to me

here the sun speaks to me

of the dry bones of my father.

      2

There are no dry bones

in the northern valleys, in the Harlem alleys

young / black / men with knees bent

nod on the stoops of the tenements

and dream

of the dry bones of my father.

And young white longhairs who flee

their homes, and bend their minds

and sing their songs of brotherhood

and no more wars are searching for

my father’s bones.

      3

There are no dry bones here.

We hide from the sun.

No more do we take the long straight strides.

Our steps have been shaped by the cages

that kept us. We glide sideways

like crabs across the sand.

We perch on green lilies, we search

beneath white rocks...

THERE ARE NO DRY BONES HERE

The skull of my father

grins at the Mississippi moon

from the bottom

of the Tallahatchie.