#MIDDLEBURY
Ota Benga at Edankraal
Yusef Komunyakaa
Maybe it was hog-killing time
when he arrived in Lynchburg,
Virginia, several lifetimes behind him,
the old smell of the monkey house
at the New York Zoological Gardens
receding, a broken memory left.
Not sure of the paths & turns
taken, woozy in a swarm of hues,
he stood in Anne Spencer’s garden
surrounding the clapboard house,
but when she spoke he came back
to himself. The poet had juba
in her voice, & never called him
Artiba, Bengal, Autobank, or
Otto Bingo. Her beds of tiger
lilies, sweet peas, & snapdragons
disarmed him. Her fine drawl
summoned rivers, trees, & boats,
in a distant land, & he could hear
a drum underneath these voices
near the forest. He never spoke
of the St. Louis World’s Fair
or the Bronx Zoo. The boys
crowded around him for stories
about the Congo, & he told them
about hunting “big, big” elephants,
& then showed them the secret
of stealing honey from the bees
with bare hands, how to spear fish
& snare the brown mourning dove.
One night he sat in the hayloft,
singing, “I believe I’ll go home.
Lordy, won’t you help me?”
A hoot owl called to the moon
hemmed in a blackberry thicket,
& he bowed to the shine of the gun.
About this poem
“Over a decade ago, the poet Carrie Allen McCray told me that, as a child, she had known Ota Benga – the Congolese man and Mbuti Pygmy who had been exhibited as an oddity in a ‘human zoo’ exhibition in New York City. Ota Benga had lived with her mother in Lynchburg, Va. Later I learned that he had also known and trusted the poet Anne Spencer, and there the poem began in my psyche.” – Yusef Komunyakaa
About Yusef Komunyakaa
Yusef Komunyakaa is the author of “The Emperor of Water Clocks” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). He teaches at New York University and lives in New York City.
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day@poets.org.
(c) 2016 Yusef Komunyakaa. Originally published in Poem-a-Day, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.
