NEAL HALL - Featured Poet

Black Face, White Mask

to keep deep    

a distance from which they         

can’t see in me

a distance from which

I can’t feel me in me, I’m             

Indoctrinated an ala-baster’d self-hate

to paint my black face beneath

white powdered lies and alibis

relegated a caste clown face,

when all lives matters why my face,       

why make-up my face a cash cow clown,

a round the clock house negro selling out

to sold  out crowds of ala-baster’d men

making me up in make-up to cover up my pain,

my disgrace, my fate of white powdered self-hate

they paint dark faces of darker races

when all lives matter,

with bleaching cream screams, 

I white powder me

so that I can’t see black in me,

so that  I keep skin deep distance between

black me and wanna be white me you've

brainwashed me to be

no upside on the down side       

of the flipped up side of a frown

on a made up clown,     

made up in white face make-up to be

the grinning black faced white clown fool,

the court’s jester dressed in mental slavery,

an inner circle fool entertaining, juggling

peddling bi-pedaled tricycles around a three ringed

outer circle of circular white lies and alibis

Bio:

Poet Neal Hall is a medical-surgical eye physician and graduate of Cornell and Harvard Universities. An internationally acclaimed poet, he has composed poetry and performed readings throughout the U. S. and internationally to include: Kenya, Indonesia, France, Jamaica, Morocco, Canada, Nepal, Italy, Ghana, Japan, India and Germany. Dr. Hall is an award-winning author of four books of poetry: Nigger For Life, reflecting his painful discovery, that in “unspoken America," race is the one thing by which he is first judged, first measured and metered diminished value, dignity, equality and justice. Winter’s A’ Coming Still reflecting the more things are said to change, the more things are made to stay the same. His third book is Where Do I Sit. Appalling Silence represents selections of his work translated into Telugu and Urdu and published in India. His sixth book Door of No Return will be released in the fall of 2017. His work has been translated into 5 additional languages: Bengali, Kannada, German, Japanese and Italian. The latter translated (5th book) for a Critical Edition of his work in Italian to be published in Rome, Italy. Three collaborating Italian scholars performed the translations and critical analysis. Professor Kazuteru Omori, Director, Dept of African American Studies, Hokkai Gakuen University, Sapporo, Japan, has translated a collection of Hall’s work into Japanese. The collection is to be published in Japan.