Your words dance like Zulu warriors
I honor you because your inspiration is immeasurable
I love you in honest onyx hues Triple Blak
I witnessed you preach and teach with anointed tongue as you slammed for
the nation
Your funky words linger in my mental after all these years Regie Gibson
Much greater than Love Jones you are our brother to the night and yes
It is All Right my Afrocentric wordsmiths
Long before the beautiful dreads you stepped to the mic with humility only
to
Blow it to pieces and I dubbed you Miles, enough said
Storyteller extraordinaire you took us there every Sunday and truth be told
You taught me to give my gift to communal concerns Oba
Rituals was the village where I learned from Corey
Beginning of my poetic story, now my journey is real
Three poetic kings opened my creativity and set it free
I honor you for the millions you have touched
Your words have always been sacred to me
Just as they should be
You taught me well and I hold the lessons close because of you
I am she, poet, writer, producer and host, doing what I love most
All because I saw beyond the applause when you shared your soul
Under indigo lights giving praise to the all that is spoken
Thank you for your powerful, raw, honest, gritty, beautiful and loving
words
From: Uptown Déjà Vu
Summary
“Gratitude, For My Griots” by Jimmie Ware is a poem centered on love and relationships, social justice, aging. The poem develops its subject through recurring images and shifts in emotional pressure rather than reducing the experience to a single statement.
Analysis
Voice
A personal, first-person speaker combines recollection with direct emotional address.
Style and form
The poem is line-driven, first-person. The poem moves by accumulation: images, references, and tonal turns build on one another, so meaning emerges from their relationships as much as from narrative sequence.
Themes and imagery
Its strongest thematic currents include love and relationships, social justice, aging, nature. Concrete images give those abstractions physical weight, while changes in diction and pace keep the poem from settling into a single emotional register.
Reading the poem
A productive way to read “Gratitude, For My Griots” is to watch how its images change function as the poem progresses. Details that initially establish scene or memory become emotional evidence. The result is a poem whose argument is carried through association, rhythm, and image as much as through explicit statement.
Explore this poem
Source & rights
Source: Uptown Déjà Vu
Rights: Copyright controlled by the rights holder. Published here with permission.