In my street the boys hum a borrowed song,
because what else is there to hum,
in the absence of anthems we trust —
hum it as the sky folds into itself
— John Brown’s song,
their lips a thin seam of rust,
we do not own the language but it still tastes of home.
Across the storefront, a man counts the cracks in his reflection,
the season is spring, so he peers into the mind of spring,
but the air is rehearsing grief.
It is spring, but the air remembers a harder season.
Across the storefront, glass is a second sky:
inside it, a man drowning in his own reflection.
Yes, springtime is happening but not here
here a boy carries a cantaloupe / the sun trapped in its rind,
he sings it open;
a boy peeling his own mind like fruit,
like it’s the head of someone he loved.
He opens it with a song. The melody leaks out of him,
is an old bone / rattles in the throat of the living:
John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave.

Beyond him, the watchers lift the wind,
muscles full of stolen weather,
a skin becomes the first thief through a door,
history folds its small hands,
here our skin is the map of what will be taken,
here we sing anyway,
the boy — oh, that boy — keeps on singing the fight,
as gulls wheel over a harbour, and a sea, tired
of oppression, turns the horizon into a blade;
ye soldiers of freedom strike while you may.