And did ever a man go black with sun in a Belgian swamp,
On a feathery African plain where the sunburnt lioness lies,
And a cocoanut monkey grove where the cockatoos scratch the
skies,
And the zebras striped with moonlight grasses graze and stomp?
With a swatch of the baboon’s crimson bottom cut for a lip,
And a brace of elephant ivories hung for a tusky smile,
With the muscles as level and lazy and long as the lifting Nile,
And a penis as loaded and supple and limp as the slaver’s whip?
Are you beautiful still when you walk downtown in a knife-cut
coat
And your yellow shoes dance at the corner curb like a brand new
car,
And the buck with the arching pick looks over the new-laid tar
As you cock your eye like a cuckoo bird on a two o’clock note?
When you got so little in steel-rim specs, when you taught that
French,
When you wrote that book and you made that speech in the bot
tom south,
When you beat that fiddle and sang that role for Othello’s mouth,
When you blew that horn for the shirt-sleeve mob and the snaky
wench?
When you boxed that hun, when you raped that trash that you
didn’t rape,
When you caught that slug with a belly of fire and a face of gray,
When you felt that loop and you took that boot from a KKK,
And your hands hung down and your face went out in a blast
of grape?
Did the Lord say yes, did the Lord say no, did you ask the Lord
When the jaw came down, when the cotton blossomed out of your
bones?
Are you coming to peace, O Booker T. Lincoln Roosevelt Jones,
And is Jesus riding to raise your wage and to cut that cord?
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