ysabetwordsmith | Poem: "Brothers, Equals"

This poem was inspired by a prompt from LJ user Pocketnaomi. It has been sponsored by LJ user Lone_cat. It belongs to the Danso and Family thread of the Polychrome Heroics series.

"Brothers, Equals"
-- Alcaic stanzas

You cannot name a people as ignorant
Who turn your language, basketlike, whispering,
Back running over self and substance:
Listen and learn or else fall to failure.

O Best Beloved, African history
Tells tales that Europe, envying, echoing,
Brings home to ponder weighty meanings nightly:
Honor us, join with us, brothers, equals.

* * *

NOTES:

This is a poem by Danso, rather than about him. One of his pet peeves is people who talk down to him because of his race, his background, and whatnot. There's a saying, "No man can call you ignorant if you can beat him in a game of chess." Every culture has things it respects as signs of sophistication; in America, chess is one and poetry is another. If you can write poetry in Greek forms, you have disproven the argument that you are uneducated or unintelligent.

Alcaic stanza is a Greek form of poetry which relies on syllables. It doesn't fit well with English, but I've made a capable effort here.

The Just-So Stories by Rudyard Kipling relate fables about why the animals are the way they are. "The Elephant's Child" is one that explicitly mentions Africa. "O Best Beloved" is a phrase from there.

African history is the wellspring of humanity, so pay your respects.

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♫ With our brother we will share
All the secrets of our mountain
All the riches buried there ♪

Huh. That's a Canadian song, eh? Today I have learnt something. Thank you, Lambert and Potter. It's still bloody well relevant today, forty-odd years later.

Amazing.

I'm glad you enjoyed this.

Oh, this is beautiful! It speaks to Danso's skill with words as much as it does yours, and yes, that's a layered compliment. :)

I'm glad it worked in layers for you. It's challenging to write from another character's perspective.

Wow. This is lovely. Thank you. It's great to see a little of Danso's own writing, especially when I find out how well he does it!

You're welcome! He's a smart kid. People have a bad habit of looking at him as a black, recently homeless, fostered, teen father and then they tend to think poorly of him. But Danso is smart as well as durable.

I always knew he was smart. You don't succeed at keeping yourself and a handful of younger children alive for extended periods with a set of resources that begins and ends with your collective skins and whatever they contain, without being smart. I just didn't know he had had an opportunity to study ancient Greek poetic forms. :D

>>I always knew he was smart. You don't succeed at keeping yourself and a handful of younger children alive for extended periods with a set of resources that begins and ends with your collective skins and whatever they contain, without being smart.<<

Precisely.

>> I just didn't know he had had an opportunity to study ancient Greek poetic forms. :D <<

My first thought is that it's from school. Another possibility is Sankofa.

Yeah, my first thought was that he first encountered a brief reference in school -- for example, a few example poems from the period, as enrichment material for an Ancient History class -- and decided it looked interesting, so he used those as a jumping-off point and went diving into the poets and the forms for himself, at home.

Most high schools wouldn't teach anything as esoteric as Greek poetry in any depth, unless he happened to be studying the Greek language at a relatively advanced level... and I doubt that, even if Greek is his foreign language, he'd be advanced enough to be doing poetry translation given how much school he missed, and how briefly he's been attending steadily again. But ancient history is a nearly universal part of the curriculum in American high schools, and when exactly they teach it can wobble all over a six-year period, depending on that school's preferences and convenience. So it would be entirely possible for him to be studying that, or have done so in a previous term; and then wandered off into his own studies just for the fun of it.

T-America is far more fluent about multicultural awareness. While it's unlikely for esoteric forms to be assigned, that's exactly the kind of stuff that appears as extra credit. Assignment: pick one form and write a poem (ballad, heroic couplets, sonnet). Extra credit: Write the other forms. Or write an exotic form (Greek alsaics, Sapphic verse, toddaid, clogyrnach).

Ancient history is another possibility, of course. Who knows, maybe Danso is into that. At a big high school such as this one in Onion City, they probably offer five or six foreign languages. I would bet on the usuals of Spanish, German, and French; something from a very different family like Russian or Japanese; and either Latin or Greek but probably not both.

I can see Danso getting into an assignment like that poetic forms thing, and doing *both* the extra credit versions... writing a poem in each form, including each of the exotic forms listed. :D

Well, that's what I usually did with that type of assignment. Another type we often got in my favorite English class had a description of the form, a sample poem, and then space to write one. I'd usually make several.

Poem: "Brothers, Equals"

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