Hello my name is Candace J. Anderson, and I am honored to be featured in the
Bathhouse Blog. My family and I live in Ann Arbor, and I have been a teacher at St.
Paul Early Childhood Center and Preschool since 2017. I am a graduate student at
Eastern Michigan University in my third semester of the Creative Writing Program. I am
truly grateful for the opportunity to participate in a wonderful program with professors
who have shown me the limitless possibilities in Creative Writing, and have helped me in
my continued growth as a writer.
About the Poems
And Still We Wait, and And Still We Wait (Reprise)
These poems were written in response to our current social and political climate within the African-American community that has often transitioned into different forms of enslavement and oppression throughout history. Though these works, I hope to give a reader a glimpse into that systematic oppression.
My goal is to be able to provoke thought, and possibly start new conversations about the work that still needs to be done by all Americans, in our fight for true freedom and equality.
Candace J. Anderson, Poet, February 19, 2021
And Still We Wait
Browbeaten under the festering pustulous sun
wading in the recesses of history expunged a
cerebrally castrated apparition
husk of humanities vermin
hollowed and left to
toiling like a stoic effigy
corralled livestock
undertow, governed
And still we wait
rebellion cleaving to the western blot
scourged with fire
branded by emaciation
underbudded iniquities putrefied
And still we wait
bifurcating our native tongue
a prosodic dysfunction that leaves
the central binary form scattered to the west impotent
ravaging our idiomatic expressions
casting it into swine
scavenging marrow abrasions
undergirded while birthing your disruptions
And still we wait
circadian rhythms
underfonged
binded by covetous
abhorrent reverie slothering
heterogeneity morphing state
dropping into quiet sleep
Splintered
And still we wait
tongues clucking, clicking
utterances groaned in spirit
interceding
the lingual frenulum affixed
singing praises of a
paradoxical dysarthria
aphasic and depleted
under siege by the harvest
waiting reap a reward is not in or of this life
And still we wait
listening lapping up dry morsels
creature comforts
listless
underseeing the overseer
plucking motes from the eyes of
these man-made God’s while using one hand to
place cotton to balance the scales of justice
with rubbed raw pink fleshy cuticles and wielding a shotgun in the other
We will wait no more
like dogs gnawing on bone
with ulcerated bleeding gums
gritting through sawed down teeth while being
undervalued and desensitized to our own plight an
induced hyperreal simulacrum burdened to break free
fortified
And Still We Wait…(Reprise)
And still we wait…
Still, sorrowful, silenced
Souls war down
Heels cracked thorns in feet
Immobilized
Transitioned from one form of captivity to another
Slavery, sharecropping, the new jim crow
Sowing blood soaked seeds
Harvesting on borrowed time
Freedom bathing us in blue
Batons tenderize our meat
Hair conditioned with yolks and scalding coffee
Cleansed with fire hoses and spittle
German Shepherds lapping at our skin
Puffed up lungs exuding chants that
blow out burning crosses
Black leathered gloved hands signaling retreat
Pig squeals through hate sealed eyes
Using mulatove cocktails to illuminate our path as we
cut that mutilated strange fruit from rope dangling on trees
Bodies cured by the sun, charred by blazing gazes
fingers pointed with affixed poses, gleaming smiles
Camera flashes at the pedestrian attractions
Retrieving bloated bodies from rivers
baptized in blood
Rebellion spilling into the streets
Kinky coily crowns that defy gravity stretching towards the sun flow in unison
Fists lacerate the spaces between the wind
Boots March in unison standing face to face with ballistic shields and masked faces
Trudging through chitterlings, malt liquor, and crack