Alfred Celestine: Poetry

Alfred Celestine, a gay African American poet who died in London in 2009 aged 60, is receiving renewed recognition for his fierce, lyrical verse exploring race, queerness and displacement.

As Jeremy Hilton said in a memorial feature in Fire magazine: “…when I heard [Celestine] read in London in 2007, …I knew I was in the presence of a major, but little-recognised and little-published, poet. What struck me about him was a combination of his powerful use of language, the depth of emotion underlying the linguistic strictness, and his drawing on history, his own personal struggles and the way these interweaved with the struggle of black people as a nation to find their roots and their contemporary forms of expression. All this powerful stuff was, in Al Celestine’s work, finding expression through a continuation of the modernist mode….” Despite long neglect, his posthumous presence is growing, affirming the legacy of a poet who gave voice to generations lost and found.

Freedom

The whole frame of the doorway fills with fear:
the young men emerging early for work
look back on spouses covered with fatigue;
the children have already begun
to lay aside the night and its terrors.
Afraid, very afraid, the factory lights blink on
smelling of long-contracted disappointments
and the bacon, sizzling in the pan, waits for eggs.
The morning leaves skipping down steps: alone,
everybody here repeats some routine. That’s why
the two women sit down facing each other,
touching coffee cups once or twice without thinking.
Perhaps they were actually touching
each other’s hands because just as I glanced
a second time through the half-opened door
nobody’s there, except a deserted kitchen table
searching for something, waiting for someone. That’s why
the two women hurry down the main drag, turning
slowly into a side-street – a known place, Freedom.”

Excerpt from 100 Queer Poems, Edited by Mary Jean Chan and Andrew McMillan, 2022.

Confessions of Nat Turner

Preface

It is winter.
The house on Crow Street is empty.
It smells of death.
It is stuffed with incident.
A child in rags
Descends like a hawk suddenly.
An old woman,
Her legs bowed, strips the remains.
It is raining.
She collects useless items, she
Remembers joy,
Remembers how he ate hard bread.
The sun falls down
Without grace: and someone else rents
This house, this death.

1

Father
Those unwashed
Do not participate
Between reality and its
Report.

2

We can
Do without him.
Our heritage is not
Obscure texts.
Our humour is not
Vulgate.

3

Facts like
Locks without keys
Remain unopened.
There are other rooms, other myths
Waiting.

4

Statement:
I hunt the stump.
I question its body.
I feel disgust. The river soaks
Its roots.

5

The tribe
Of Word gathers
A few steps away. Blood
Introduces Poem and falls
Asleep.

6

Warning:
The procedure,
Like a fixer, fastens
Image to paper, but without
Rancour.

7

I move
Pure, specific.
I talk of thirsts, not light.
Who is he, but skilful fiction:
Skin, bone?

8

The earth
Alone mirrors
Vulgar crow who evokes
This image: bonds confess, bonds sing
Our blues.

9

Dark man
Pulls energy
From air like a wireless.
He transmits: primitive. My feet
Shut up.

10
The soul
Has its sandbars.
These days, when I stand still,
Not part of the stream, I remain
Human.

11

Midday.
The sky is clear.
The sassafrass tree sleeps
Without shame. Sometimes I can feel
Almost.

12

A crow,
Dying of thirst,
Wanders from field to field,
Reminiscing about its past,
Its droughts.

13

Jacob strums
It’s doing what must be done
And keeping up appearances
To become a part of what is.
The stars are hysterical with green omens.
The wide water parts, and he slips
Further and further down into perfection
Because song is naked, and terror
Because it’s organic, because it’s rooted
Spreads deep into our bowels and cannot be sung.
It does not have a name this tune.
We have nothing to cleanse our wound
When a string breaks with its own song.
He sees pilgrims, horrific puritans,
Lost, like a crow flying beyond its field.
Doubt ripens.
Doubt sleeps in the mouth of rivers.
It has the colour of mustard greens.
It has, of course, two sides;
They sway within us like complaint.
Who wants to translate suffering, and who
Weeps for your old juju man now?
Here among hot ash each generation
Like smoke searching for its gone fire
Rises to tell us what we want.

14

The narrow gate closed.
The yard filled with enraged masters.
Dead Eye harboured horizons.
His face loomed in the half-moon.
There were rumours of owls.
There were pockets of blood.
Red cauldron of ignorance boils
Over with screams.
The crowd was like small white teeth. Standing there,
Digesting their own sins,
They spoke of refusals,
The necessity of remaining pure.
The flame grew hungry; the rope bit
Savagely into Dead Eye’s wrists.
Hundreds of things connected them.
Fear divided.
The past was a bull’s eye:
The beginning, the end.
They heard something approach and stop.
The tar smiled; the feathers snickered.
Dead Eye stood still.
He cut from each defeat a thread.
He emerged
A black phoenix
Intoxicated, sinister.

15

Water is the element of black bull:
Half-beast, half-man.
It was trapped in a wet labyrinth.
Its mother opposed the past.
Shrieks, prophecy.
Fallen, it escaped sordid fables.
Her body rented in two spheres.
It pulled broken plough for years. My name,
Its babel, earth.
Me: half-literate and ferocious
Hibernated.
The cold fire of this page considered
Ash, its coherent
Message failed to convince us
And rekindled doubt.
Roots clutched blind routines, halved my limbs
And lay grinning.
17Old beast, with a pocket full of peanuts,
Paced alone.
Thought of waxed partridge wings, then called
Back dead memory.
The river wound past its mud hut.
Black birds like rain spoke.
I dream the dark once more, the moon
In Gabriel.

16

Then Mattie, as she was crossing corn fields,
On the road to Jerusalem, died.
The years between hope and despair
Suddenly opened, and images
Poured like rain.
Perhaps the ripe pomegranate.
Perhaps the rock partridge
Lifted the weight
And rooted, broke slowly into flower.
She conjured her life
Cruelly inarticulate.
He touched them.
How did he know these things?
A moving dark,
Crawling like a spider,
Healed their wounds with herbs.
18A wild ass in barbaric Babylon
Wandered thirty years belted by death
Before he perfectly
Walked into his own ambush.
Was he the One?
The black bull, the handful of pure water?
Mother waited for the master,
Full of the ways of God,
Her feet were hungry for revenge.

17

The earth has no place for the yeast
Of imagination.
It is a place of poltergeists.
And again: Big Mama in whom the Lord
Sang now and then like a magpie,
Testified,
Rolled in red dust of the threshing floor.
Shut in, behind the bars of sanctity,
We stamped, like livestock, common burdens.
In the dark of the sun,
Like Pasiphäe, with the same conviction,
She danced the Holy Ghost and moved
Down the line and shouted.

Extras from Alfred Celestine, Weightless Words—selected poems— edited by David Miller & Richard Leigh, Shearsman Books, 2017.

– – –

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at [email protected]

– – –

When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know.

– – –

Listen to our podcast ‘Queer News & Journalism’ on your favourite podcast platform. 

We appreciate it. Thanks for reading.