Epilogue From Takeo

One weekend in July, I took a guided tour in Harlem. Being a poet, I've had a sort of amateurish interest in the Harlem Renaissance, in Langston and Zora and the like. In the Schonberg Center for black culture, we stood over a large circular mosaic that depicted parts of Africa, America, and the broader African diaspora, and written all over was lines from Langston Hughes' "The Negro Speaks of Rivers":

I've known rivers:

I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow

of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went

down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn

all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

In a workshop, we learned that when Lorca wrote "A Poet in New York," it was supposed to be sort of an ironic, oxymoronic title. How interesting that New York would produce Hughes, Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, and now Saul Williams, the Urban Word youth. Now poetry is a damn way of life. Among the multiplicities of cultures in New York, the culture of poets snakes its way through the tributaries of the youth minds here. It flows through Bronx cyphers, through Bed-Stuy open mics, through Spanish Harlem slams, through Manhattan readings... You see the youth warrior-poets, the middle class academicians making fun of the youth warrior-poets, and the grown up youth making fun of the Academy, but whether it rhymed or had rhythm or was memorized or had the pretense of avoiding memorization, it was all poetry.

My last day in New York was meeting Amiri Baraka in workshop and watching his performance. I told him how my dad in '67, then a Filipino farm boy at the age of 12, first picked up his book somewhere in the California Central Valley and got inspired to be political and passed that consciousness down to me. In a humble way I, as I am today, had descended from his words, and now here I was, full circle, shaking his hand.

After that performance, I knew that it would be the last time (for a while) that I would see the many great poets I had met out there. It was a series of very affectionate goodbyes. The many poets I had interviewed and spent time with had become my friends. I realized that quite honestly, I would miss them. I had become so adjusted to the environment here that I started to think myself as one of them, a young New York poet. And quite honestly, that's basically what I was.

Now that I'm back in the Bay, where the air is cleaner and a car makes more sense than the train, it all feels quite surreal. Like a big flurry of a dream. I've accomplished a lot of research and a lot of work, but the things I remember most are the infinite specificities of the people I had the privilege to meet and know a little about. And maybe a little like falling in love, those memories are something I keep close to my chest and feel a little giddy about because those images are my own little secret to myself.