“Don’t Call Him Ishmael” by Frank X Walker

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Hard time didn’t make Brother wiser
like it did Etheridge Knight.
He returned home from prison
with a pocket full of excuses, not poems.

You’d thought he’d read Moby Dick
while on lock down, the way he chased
great whites, each encounter separating him
like Ahab from his leg, first from his own
children and eventually from    himself.

Regret is for families forgiving enough
to break their own promises,
not realizing that even if the harpoon
is made of love, it can still drag
the whole boat down with the whale.

We might have understood revenge
and even obsession, but addiction
is more unforgiving than the sea.

–Frank X Walker,
About Flight
(Accents Publishing)

dr. frank x walker thumbnailMultidisciplinary artist and Danville, Kentucky native, Frank X Walker, is the former Poet Laureate of Kentucky, and Professor in the department of English and the African American and AfricanaStudies Program at the University of Kentucky. The founding editor of Pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture is a Cave Canem Fellow, co-founder of the Affrilachian Poets, and the author of seven collections of poetry including Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers, winner of the 2014 NAACP Image Award for best poetry collection. The Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry recipient is the originator of the word, Affrilachia, and wholly committed to deconstructing and forging a new definition of a pluralistic Appalachia.

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