The Roots Do a Live Cover of Mayfield's “Move On Up”

A visual poem with elements of regular text, text in handwritten font, and black spheres of varying sizes with white text inside. The woven structure allows for three different readings of the poem that are in conversation with each other. The complete text is as follows. The Roots Do a Live Cover of Mayfield’s “Move On Up” Bilal cries Dear God and Black Thought strokes entendres in his beard. A shadow splits the light confetti with a brass throat wrapped around his waist. What is the tipping point after which nothing lost once, twice can be lost again? Once, I walked up the driveway to find my father smashing The Roots Come Alive and The Rose That Grew from Concrete with a broom stick. Dear indigo grammar. Dear never- to-come-home-again hanging on for the by-and-by. In this Charybdis of gold-studded angers, sweet as peaches soaking the weft of their own plucked selves. I’m so far from the last bed you slept in. Nobody gets a better view. Tonight I’m Lucifer falling toward a hip human perfection. Call it I love you too, Pa. This song, even a damaged good knows all the words.

Credit

Copyright © 2021 by Cynthia Dewi Oka. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 30, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem

“Seeing The Roots live for the first time was a holy, rambunctious, time-bending, excessive, erotic, and otherworldly experience that inspired me to respond in kind. I was not raised to be a brave person. As an immigrant kid, my home was ripe with fears, my own girl-body being the worst terror of all. Hip hop, with its incessance of wonder, anger, rigor, pride, invention, was the soundscape that taught me how to square my shoulders and save my own life, and this particular Curtis Mayfield song remains my angel.”
—Cynthia Dewi Oka