Paragraph on/to Wanda Coleman
Dead poets and prophets are better
understood than the ones who use the air.
Henceforth, your tough tenderness will sting. Your silence will be more hauntingly powerful
than your sounding out the syllables.
Your collages of feeling and shards of dreamglass will more effectively
cut the flesh of death-bound-subjects, allowing the demons, dogs and bitches by
them possessed to be transformed in the ecology of always changing new
worlds. The blue jazz you lived was no
stereotype; it was a scalpel that exposed the bone structures of efforts to be
human. You channeled Calafia. You
learned us the futility of tears. Thus,
I will not weep for you but pray a requiem for your splendid soul, your work
and works. “Let the work,” you said in an interview on May 11, 2013, “be the
revolution.” So it is. So it shall henceforth be.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. November 24, 2013
