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     Chrishayden "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Chrishayden Post Number: 1520 Registered: 03-2004 Rating: N/A |
Excerpts from "The Ancient Rain"* by Bob Kaufman written during the period 1973-1978 After Ending his Ten-Year Buddhist Vow of Silence 1962-1972 Begun Upon the Murder of John F. Kennedy and Ending in February 1973 on the day the Vietnam War Ended. At the illusion world that has come into existence of world that exists secretly, as meanwhile the humorous Nazis on television will not be as laughable, but be replaced by silent and blank TV screens. At this time, the dead nations of Europe and Asia shall cast up the corpses from the graveyards they have become. But today the Ancient Rain falls, from the far sky. It will be white like the rain that fell on the day Abraham Lincoln died. It shall be red rain like the rain that fell when George Washington abolished monarchy. It shall be blue rain like the rain that fell when John Fitzgerald Kennedy died. They will see the bleached skeletons that they have become. By then it shall be too late for them. All the symbols shall return to the realm of the symbolic and reality become the meaning again. In the meantime, masks of life continue to cover the landscape. Now on the landscape of the death earth, the Luftwaffe continues to fly into Volkswagens through the asphalt skies of death. It shall be black rain like the rain that fell on the day Martin Luther King died. It shall be the Ancient Rain that fell on the day that Franklin Delano Roosevelt died. It shall be the Ancient Rain that fell the day that Nathan Hale died. It shall be a brown rain that fell on the day that Crispus Attucks died. It shall be the Ancient Rain that fell on July Fourth, 1776, when America became alive. In America, the Ancient Rain is beginning to fall again. The Ancient Rain falls from a distance secret sky. It shall fall here on America, which alone remains alive, on this earth of death. The Ancient Rain is supreme and is aware of all things that have happened. The Ancient Rain is brilliant yellow as it was on the day Custer died. The Ancient Rain is the source of all things, the Ancient Rain knows all secrets. The Ancient Rain illuminates America. The Ancient Rain shall kill genocide. The Ancient Rain shall bring death to those who love and feel only themselves. The Ancient Rain is all colors, all forms, all shapes, all sizes. The Ancient Rain is a mystery known only to itself. The Ancient Rain filled the seas.The Ancient Rain killed all the dinosaurs and left only one dinosaur skeleton to remind the world that the Ancient Rain is falling again. . . . The Ancient Rain is falling again. The Ancient Rain is falling on the waves of immigrants who fled their homelands to come to this home of Ancient Rain to be free of tyranny and hunger and injustice, and who now refuse to go to school with Crispus Attucks, the Ancient Rain knows they were starving in Europe. The Ancient Rain is falling. It is falling on the NATO meetings. . . . Will there be peace or war? The Ancient Rain knows but does not say. I make speculations of my own, but I do not discuss them, because the Ancient Rain is falling. . . . The Ancient Rain wets my face and I am freed from hatreds of me that discuise themselves with racist bouquets. The Ancient Rain has moved me to another world, where the people stand still and the streets moved me to destination. I look down on the Earth and see myself wandering in the Ancient Rain ecstatic, aware that the death I feel around me is in the hand of the Ancient Rain and those who plan death for me and dreams are know to the Ancient Rain . . . silent, humming raindrops of the Ancient Rain. The Ancient Rain is falling. The Washington Monument rumbles. The Lincoln Memorial is surrounded by stars. Mount Rushmore stares into every face. The Continental Congress meets in the home of the Ancient Rain. Nathan Hale stands immaculate at the entrance to the Capitol. Crispus Attucks is taken to school by Thomas Jefferson. Boston is quiet. The Ancient Rain is falling. . . . I see the death some cannot see, because I am a poet spread-eagled on this bone of the world. A war is coming, in many forms. It shall take place. The South must hear Lincoln at Gettysburg, the South shall be forced to admit that we have endurd. The black son of the American Revolution is not the son of the South. Crispus Attucks' death does not make him the Black son of the South. So be it. Let the voice out of the whirlwind speak: Federico Garcia Lorca wrote: Black Man, Black Man, Black Man For the mole and the water jet Stay out of the cleft. Seek out the great sun Of the center. The great sun gliding over dryads. The sun that undoes all the numbers, Yet never crossed over a dream. The great sun gliding over dryads, the sun that undoes all the numbers, yet cross over a dream. At once I am there at the great sun, feeling the great sun of the center. Hearing the Lorca music in the endless solitude of crackling blueness. I could feel myself a little boy again in crackling blueness, wanting to do what Lorca says in crackling bluenes to kiss out my frenzy on bicycle wheels and smash little squares in the flush of a soiled exultation. Federico Garcia Lorca sky, the immaculate scoured sky, equaling only itself contained all the distances that Lora is, that he came from Spain of the Inquisition is no surprise. His poem of solitude walking around Columbia. My first day in crackling blueness, I walked off my ship and rode the subway to Manhattan to visit Grant's tomb and I thought because Lorca said he would let his hair grow long someday crackling blueness would cause my hair to grow long. I decided to move deeper into crackling blueness. When Franco's civil guard killed, from that moment on, I would move deeper in crackling blueness. I kept my secrets. I observed those who read him who were not Negro and listened to their misinterpretation of him. I thought of those who had been around him, those that were not Negro and were not in crackling blueness, those that couldn' t see his wooden south wind, a tiltin' black slime that tacked down all the boat wrecks, while Saturn delayed all the trains. I remember the day I went into crackling blueness. His indescribable voice saying Black Man, Black Man, for the mole and the water jet, stay out of the cleft, seek ou the great Sun of the Center. *Kaufman, Bob. The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956-1978. A New Directions Book, New York City, 1981. copyright 1981, by Raymond Foye. Editor's Note: For the pat two decades [1960-1980] Bob Kaufman has been engaged in the active practice of being obscure, living the Orphic myth, adroitly avoiding all public contact. He had been a legendary figure among the jazzmen and bohemians of the 1940's and '50s. Flamboyant and quick-witted, he was the original "beatnik" -- a word he invented. His three broadsides ("Abomunist Manifesto," " Second April," "Does the Secret Mind Whisper?") published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Books, became overnight classics of the Beat Generation. Adapting the harmonic complexities and spontaneous invention of be-bop to poetic euphony and meter, he became the quintessential jazz poet. . . . Kaufman left San Francisco for New York in the spring of 1960. He had been invited to read at Harvard University and was to begin work on his first book, Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (New Directions, 1965). But the New York years were filled with poverty, addiction, and imprisonment. The poem "Blood Fell on the Mountains," was composed upon his rturn to San Francisco in 1963. Thre days later, Kaufaman took a ten-year Buddhist vow of silence, prompted by the assassination of President Kennedy. For the next decade he neither spoke nor wrote. Kaufman broke his silence in February 1973 on the day the Vietnam War ended. he stunned a local gathering one evening by reciting Thomas a Becket's speech from T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral ("They know and do not know, what is is to act or suffer . . .") , followed by his own untitled poem which begins section two ("All those ships that never sailed . . .") which, like many of his poems, have been transcribed from a tape recording. During the next five years, Kaufman composed some of the finest poems of his career--simple, lofty and resplendent. In the poem "The Ancient Rain," he renews his preoccupation with Federico Garcia Lorca, as he seeks to reconstruct the battered psyche of the Black man through poetry. In 1978, Kaufman abruptly renounced writing and withdrew once again into silence. Raymond Foye, Editor 27 October, 1980 New York City |
