Tradesman
by Kent Foreman
_____________________________________
Seriously, I’m a gravedigger,
I dig
gravely.
Hey, it’s a gig,
you know,
a job
Shit, it’s a semi-skilled trade
So when it comes to calling a spade a spade
I can hardly be afraid
you dig?
I’m a gravedigger
Half a poet big
Three-quarters nigger
Lord, as lonely as the only survivor
of some decimated horde, sword
still speckled with an adversary’s blood
Or, lonely as the pioneer droplet
heralding the coming of the floods.
Machines penetrated much more efficiently than I.
Automated to this rock-bound cemetery clay.
Hey, I’m a gravedigger.
I dig the gravely
changes.
Dig the grotesque tragic comedy of funerals.
Dig Papal Heads or Thelonious Monk rappin’.
Life ends?!
Naw,
Changes, you dig,
changes.
Cause there’s Einstein’s changes
and Marx's changes
there’s Darwin’s changes
and chemical changes
there’s Aphrodite’s changes.
The light
changes.
And then there’s the changes that everybody’s got to blow
’cause everything changes.
All this I dig and more
for
I’m a gravedigger.
I dig history, philosophy, ballistics
and thermo-nuclear physics.
Uh-huh,
GRAVES!
Now to all Euro-centric ethno-centrists
I smile and say:
“I will bury y’all.”
So long as there are people
my business is certain to thrive.
My trade must be plied by the last man alive.
For I
am a gravedigger.
I dig,
Gravely. |