Let My Words Be Food For Gods Poem by Troy Cochran

(for Chukwuma Ndububa)

Let my words be food for gods.

Let them be for apples in the cracked hands
of succulence after thirst;
for the dripping tongues of dogs
in dreams of labor in the shade
beneath the warbling birds.

Let them bring platter on platter from the brown hands of maids
in suggestion of immortality gained
by the sting and the blood of long slender blades,
followed by feathers and palm fronds fanning
a drowsy eyelid squawking at the sun.

Let them sing where all have trod;
through what laborious fields
and long ordeals
through barbed-wire runs
beyond the tongues of stuttering guns;
let them say
where all have gone, and slipped their chains,
and come up angry out of graves.

And if I
have sometimes sat through sermons unafraid;
amused myself where others knelt and prayed,
ashamed;
and if I have sometimes raged against them all,
fists and elbows to a wall,
insisting upon my own significance;
if I have sometimes lived in basements, small;
and again have towered over cloudy Judgments
many heavens tall:

Let my words be grain for all;
bare images
sprouting from the plains where heads have lain
and cattle call
and grasses grow up straight without a name.