children of the drum

_{“white folks hear the blues come out, but they don’t know how it got there.” —ma rainey}

a timeline of music

went from drum call to call for freedom

from plucking on banjos to bondage on a ship

from djembes to django

then crash

on the soil of tobacco cotton sharecroppin

fingers

coarse as their hair

coarse as the lashes on their back

coarse as their pain.

harmonized in the key of trauma

traumatized to the harm of being a minor

looking for the freedom notes

slave song rebellion anthem

mapping north like a union soldiers bugle

same fingers

plucking strings of blues

and folk guitars

same fingers

plucking the tear soaked rope from their necks

who but us could unhinge a noose

and turn into an instrument

go through hell, and make gospel

like fire shut up in the bones of a burning cross

baptize themselves in a colored fountain

who but negroes could fry a jim crow

and feed a nation revolution

to the symphony of the iron-hand-bigot called america

the pop of gunshots and police batons like snare

snared justice in the teeth of police dogs

who but colored folk could find the rhythm

in a riot

make jazz out of jail

make a motown out of a march

in formation til the

the soul need a breakbeat

we bass-boom and crack walls

crack glass ceilings

crack babies born in a concrete existence

projects built like mausoleums

forced fed products of experimental

drugs gone viral

viruses gone viral

fame at the expense of an epidemic

[we] pump up the volume and the veins

who but blacks could use needles

to spin back the hands of time

and scratch

the surface of broken history

the one america tries to skip

who but descendants of slave

now only slave to the rhythm

could take generations of suffering

and make genres full of joy

and rising sounds like

black notes are the only reason music exist

how did it get there?!

we took the off-key we were given

remixed it into a resilient medley.

while they try to silence the notes

hit the notes

dead the notes

it is said you can kill a revolutionary

but can’t kill the revolution

when you are children of the drum

people can stop the hearts

but they can never stop the beat