At Sun Ra’s Grave

Birmingham, 2001

Now our god’s dismantled,
iron arms, iron hands now laid away,
vacant head beside his vacant feet.
Vulcan, God of All the Fire
That Sleeps in Mountains
now a brash of empty veins.
Now only broadcast towers
lance the night, their amber pulse
the city’s only torches,
and below, where the terminal station
blazed 10,000 lights in welcome,
Birmingham: The Magic City,
now expressway scars the blank
and even the streets are gone
where you walked as Herman,
then Sonny, musician, mystic
man from Saturn, in your tinfoil hat
and bedsheet robe, and even
the house is gone, the room
where you played by radio light,
slowly casting off your names.

[Excerpted from A Murmuration of Starlings by Jake Adam York]