Is There a Balm in Gilead?
For Bayard Rustin
On a street where it’s always
summer, on a day
when it’s always 1948,
your song rises into ether:
“There Is a Balm in Gilead.”
Even though I never
knew you, your singing
calls me. My ears consume
the timbre of your spirituals.
When your words
soared to India, you met
Mahatma Gandhi, his ache
glowing from him like sacred
ash. Your pores drank
the anointing. Back
in Jim-Crow America, you beamed
beatific. What you absorbed
no one could tear away.
You would never allow
yourself to sit in the back of society.
But you were human.
You fell into the caress & undress
of a darkened car. Headlines
shrieked, “perversion,”
as if to scour you away
with the bristles of that word.
Despite breeding, despite
patrician features, &
that sacred meeting, you
were deemed “pariah.” Even
as you organized civil
rights marches (changing
the DNA of our soil),
you were erased.
As TV flickered from black-
&-white to color, you embraced
your white male lover,
your hair gray as a chalky
blackboard. Your chant
swelled above narrative,
no longer your own. Your hymns shone
as you survived disgrace:
expulsion from history
because of whom you loved.
Now, your disembodied
song summons me: I can’t
refrain from righting
you onto paper where you
illumine us with the perfect
audacity of your voice.
***
Read more of Dean Kostos’s poetry.
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Photo by Topher McCulloch/Flickr
