Saturday Night, 1935, Archibald J. Motley, by Ian D Smith

Saturday Night, by Archibald John Motley, Jr (USA) 1935

Saturday Night, 1935, Archibald J. Motley
​
after Gwendolyn Brooks
 
Saturday Night, the Golden Shovel, we owe
June big-time, doomed jazz players. The song we sing:
‘I can’t live without my Kitchen Man’, the sin
of Madam Buff, she’s quite a deluxe breed. We
play ‘she got what it takes’. Tall glasses of thin
gin are carried by waiters; hard liquor, gin.
 
At her table, Bessie Smith slugs a pink gin;
she shouts, ‘Man, can that girl sing. What’s her name?’ We
say June, she’s the Harlem Dancer, there’s no thin
gin here, saves all her dollar tips, then losing 
the lot gambling on the low rent south-side; we
move into black and tans, the cheap dives, the sin-
 
ners’ bars, Saturday nights — the doors close on sin,
the feral dogs, the Harlem Cabaret, gin, 
invisible, the round tables, tall stools. We
seven long-headed jazz men still play on. We
are June’s eyes, we are Bessie’s, we are bold sing-
ers, dancers, touchers — she lifts a dress of thin
 
silken gold. Archibald J. Motley, with thin-
ly disguised leers, devours the shape, the sin.
In praise of youth, the young guns, is what we sing --
Langston Hughes strikes a shadow and dies for gin,
shape-shifts with the swaying daughters, the girls we
die for — Claude McKay blows through like Dizzy. We
 
play long and hard, late into the night, then we
tend to the bar, to pin-striped bosses in thin
suits and hats, to talk of corporations we
know nothing about. We speak of school, the sin
of leaving, not saluting the flag, begin
to feel we are hollow men who cannot sing.
 
Like caged birds, we repeat old mantras, we sing
and sin again. We jazz-up old routines; awe-
some encounters with June. The girl is singin’
her heart out, singin’ for nothin’, for the thin
stripes and suits, the money-men, the landlords sin-
gled out, selected for their enterprise. We
 
jazz with June. We sing sin. We know these cruel thin
dukes whose hands stray when we ain’t looking. That’s sin,
to blame it on the gin, then we die in awe.

Ian D Smith

Ian D Smith  "I'm from Manchester in the UK, but now living in Wiltshire. I’m a state-educated poet and traditionally under-represented in UK publishing. Despite that poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, Icefloe Press, Stand, Eratio and others."