a change is gonna come by Gary Frier
SOMEWHERE NOWHERE
Don’t shop for a poem.
There are no cage-raised or certified organic inscriptions like on a carton of eggs.
No aisles to saunter & purchase a washing powder poem. Or a verse for dessert.
A poem lights on your heart like a gentle breath of air.
Don’t visit a park looking for a poem.
Musing squirrels hoisted on hind legs smiling & chewing acorns.
Yielding your ears to the ballads of birds. Or ogling the grandeur of a giant oak.
The most meditative poem alights on a mother as she feeds baby her breast.
I saw a poem composing on a poet’s spirit.
Her eyes gazed glazed out to somewhere nowhere.
A glorious twinkling of radiance explored triple darkness.
A seed inseminated & a poem bloomed from the womb.
I saw the poem resonate on her face.
She stared out the window of a train bound for Vienna.
A blurry of trees flashed. Heads drooped & heads held high.
Logs locked in boxcars. Shipped to somewhere nowhere.
I heard her poem weep profusely.
Railroad tracks of bodies nailed across mud of the Atlantic.
Timber tossed into furnaces. Fruitless Evergreens in barbwire forests.
Wood, iron, & steel battling in Gettysburg & Normandy.
I tasted the sour salt of the woman’s poem.
The puke of obliged sterility.
1/8 of a Cedar in a Pine makes it a Cedar.
The Lemon Tree will defile the Fig Tree.
I was there when the poem glowed in the poet.
A North Star glint in her eyes from Bolivia to across Canada border.
Fugitives grinding onward under roots and shadows of leaves.
Refusing to be made lumber for plantation porches & dining tables.
I was there when the poem lifted the poet
To grayish blue clouds of confusion & clarity.
A sacred & scary hallucinatory vision.
Out there. Somewhere. Nowhere.
This poem was previously published in the 2021 Santa Fe Literary Review.
About the author:
Yusef Salaam has written for the New York Amsterdam News and currently writes for the New York Beacon. His writings have appeared in Essence and DownBeat magazines. He has read his poetry at the weekly Open Mike at Sister’s Uptown Bookstore and Cultural Center in Upper Manhattan, New York. He was the co-director of the steering committee of the National Writers Union.
In the artist’s words:
Gary Frier was born in 1972 in Cape Town, South Africa, and grew up in the then-segregated northern suburb of Kuilsriver in the Western Cape.
Qualified as a Graphic Designer at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology in 2004. After working in various design industries Gary moved to create art of a more personal nature.
In addition to working as an independent artist, Gary works as a freelance designer/artist as well as facilitating/teaching a visual art and pottery programme at the Valkenburg Psychiatric Hospital Occupational Therapy Department.
Frier’s work has a strong graphic quality. He is interested in imbuing the two-dimensional image of his chosen subject with an expressive mood and personality, be it figurative or abstract. Frier combines contemporary and historical African elements and juxtaposes masks, photography, fabric detail, texture, and colour with urban culture. The subjects of his themes and subjects are culturally and socio-politically inspired. In his art, he finds inspiration in many forms of media and says that his work is about emotive reflection of his place in the world. He has exhibited extensively at public, private institutions, and galleries, both locally and abroad.
He lives and works the Western Cape predominately from his studio at his home in Kuilsriver, Cape Town.