The Fire This Time

Invoking the names of flowers, Jericho Brown meditates on ephemerality within the scope of history. He references ancient philosophers’ naming flowers and “our dead fathers” (1), presumably the slaves of America’s past. The poetic speaker and his peers call to be remembered by filming flowers before they pass on. The flora are a metaphor for black men, thirsting for “proof we existed before / Too late […]” (1). The environment of the poem also resists these flowers, which “bloom against the will / Of the sun […]” (1). Moreover, in further nod toward resistance, African Americans tended the land in the United States, but the second line points out that the soil did not belong to them. This indicates the history of enslaved black Americans, denied land ownership although they performed agricultural labor.

Although this sonnet does not follow iambic pentameter or possess a regular rhyme scheme, it does share formal similarities with a Shakespearean sonnet. Like these 14-line poems, “The Tradition” consists of three quatrains (four-line stanzas) and a couplet (two-line stanza). 

The final couplet of a Shakespearean sonnet marks a turn in its central idea: either a culmination of ideas or a new question posed by the speaker. Brown’s final couplet not only contains the only end rhyme in the poem (down and Brown), but it also marries his themes of time, death, and black life. The couplet invokes a particular apocalypse, “Where the world ends, everything cut down. / John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown” (1). These three young black men were killed by police within a month of each other in 2014.

Police shot and killed John Crawford III in an Ohio Wal-Mart on August 5, 2014. Another Wal-Mart customer had called 911 after seeing the 22-year-old Crawford with a gun, although it was an unloaded toy air rifle and a piece of store merchandise. Eric Garner died on July 17, 2014 from police officers choking him on the streets of Staten Island, New York. What began as an arrest for Garner’s selling untaxed cigarettes became a violent encounter, filmed by bystanders as Garner said, “I can’t breathe” during his final moments. Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old, died in an encounter with a white Ferguson, Missouri, police officer on August 9, 2014. His death provoked a series of riots and protests in Ferguson that spread nationwide. 

These three successive deaths marked a racial reckoning in the American social psyche, making more pointed a racial dialogue that began with the revelation of President Obama’s pastor during his campaign and continued throughout his presidency and beyond; emblematic of the change in the social conversation around race in the late ‘aughts and early teens was the creation of Black Lives Matter in 2013. Thus, to begin the anthology in this way appropriately signals the tone of the book to follow.