Melvin B. Tolson

Neighbors in lands afar,
Our native bones and flesh,
Our means and ends bizarre,
The gods of the tribe enmesh
In nets and snares of war.

Our martyrdoms unequal,
The censor fogs ashore,
We, the little people,
Their shibboleths encore.
Often our eyes see not,
Beneath the sham wherefore,
Identity of plot.

Yellow and Black and White,
We mouth a Babel tongue;
But in Gehenna’s blight,
When warps and woofs are wrung,
We speak the idioms of woe,
Speak from the morgues of night,
Our own, our Esperanto.

Many are we in one
Under the skull and skin:
Jesus, Judas, and Simpleton,
Hamlet, Babbitt, and Solomon—
Kith and kin.

Chinese and Arab and Jew,
Saxon and Eskimo,
Slav and Tartar and Kru,
Latin and Danakil and Crow—
In spite of tribal brand,
Our catholic tongue of woe
Speaks in every land
Our own, our Esperanto.

His heart is pitiless stone
Of unhewn monotone
Who hears one of us cry,
From the mesh,
Bone to bone,
Flesh to flesh,
And leaves his kith and kin to die.

Our fatherland is the earth,
Our race is humanity,
Our blood gave the freedoms birth
In the ward of history.

Our wealth is the universe
Of stars and seas and clods;
Our men of good will disperse
The icons of tribal gods.

Now put the freeman’s ax
To the loins of the evil root,
Now cleave with the freeman’s zax
The charnel-house of loot,
So that our children wax
On the freeman’s fruit!

Libretto for the Republic of Liberia

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TI

[…….]

[…….]

Realpolitik explodes the hand grenades
faits accomplis
in the peace of parades;
caught in the blizzard divide et impera,
the little gray cattle cower
before the Siamese wolves,
pomp and power;
Esperanto trips the heels of Greek;
in brain-sick lands, the pearls too rich for swine
the claws of the anonymous seek;
the case Caesarean, Lethean brew
nor instruments obstetrical at hand,
the midwife of the old disenwombs the new.
Selah!

[………….]

DO

[……..]

naïfs pray for a guido’s scale of good and evil to match
worldmusic’s sol-fa syllables (o do de do de do de)
       worldmathematics’ arabic and roman figures
       worldscience’s greek and latin symbols
              the letter killeth five hundred global tongues
              before esperanto garrotes voläpuk vanitas vanitatum

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