Leadbelly, grim with your Cajun accordian, <br />with your harmonica blues, with your knife <br /> flicking down the twelve strings of your guitar <br />--the Rock Island Line was a mighty good road-- <br /> bowing, scraping, white-suited trainman. . . <br />made your pride sick, but you sang, <br /> fast, strong, quiet, like a driven <br />demon, like you had to get it out <br /> before a razor dumped your guts <br />on a blood-mud taphouse floor, <br /> or some drunk crazy rednecks <br />nailed you up like Christ, in a dangerous world <br /> for anybody but most America for a black <br />poet of low-down places and sky-high loves. <br /> <br /> Leadbelly, thirty years hard time murder, <br />six and a half, sang your way out, ten more, intent, <br /> then Alan Lomax and his bro, John, folklorists-- <br />makes you laugh inside at night--white boys, <br /> playing--but they get you out again and in <br />the Library of Congress, that grinding <br /> voice part now of something big, like <br />storm darkness, like that lifething, <br /> love, always beyond somewhere or <br />crying deep inside, in a dark place, <br /> yeah, big like music, big like that gal you <br />call Irene! How many Irenes, you think? <br /> <br /> Even the Lomax bros, even them white boys, <br />they know Irene--you driving them through <br /> New York traffic, them folkloring in back and you <br />being their folkloring black chauffeur. <br /> You drink sharp liquor in Harlem, play <br />with Woody Guthrie, Sonny Terry, Brownie <br /> McGhee, the Headline Singers--radio too, <br />Hollywood and Three Songs by Leadbelly, <br /> a French tour. . . . You show 'em your razor <br />stretch marks, your shotpitted pot. <br /> Good night Irene I'll see you in my dreams. . . <br />all that good hot mean hard American life <br /> and Lou Gehrig's amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. <br />It's The Midnight Special! Fade me, Death!<br /><br />E. M. Schorb<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/leadbelly/
