Billy Collins reading at the 2008 Dodge Poetry Festival

Mark Doty reading at the 2006 Dodge Poetry Festival

"To Summon Up a Son," by Reginald Shepherd

For Joan Houlihan

Molded him out of shit and spit and love, mud
and a box of matchstick bones
to be my child, the son I'll never have
to comfort my young age, ages from the here
and now of sunlessness (the deepest blizzard
ever written down), a week
of overcast, a month, a year, and snow
I had forgotten to remember
to forget. Mined him out of my scarred history
and stories stolen from late night songs
on FM radio, in stereo to call my son,
out of contaminated blood,
it's dangerous to love these days
and nights of zero zero something or another
's coming. Something unpromised is coming,
something uncompromised, a something
wished for and given up, what was his name
I heard myself calling to supper? I hear him
calling father, further, faith in me, I thought
I heard him say wait for my signal to wake up
before you, or remember
who I might be, make me the apple that seizes
thine eye, heard him and then did not, my
never all over again. I made him stop, or maybe
that was my biohazard blood, said Closed
for business, please come back
another day (I'll do my best not to die
till then), a week of rain when I had thought
I saw some children playing at being snow, a child's
footprints in snow. Mixed him up
from memories and refrigerator magnets,
stirred up regrets and recompense, my confusion
made him shine, and rise, my son.
© Reginald Shepherd
[source...]

What race was Jesus? Do we care?

"There's a reference in Paul which says it's disgraceful for a man to wear long hair, so it looks pretty sure that people of that period had to have reasonably short hair. The traditional depictions of Jesus with long flowing golden hair are probably inaccurate."

Deciding on skin colour was more difficult, though. But the earliest depictions of Jews, which date from the 3rd Century, are - as far as can be determined - dark-skinned.

"We do seem to have a relatively dark skinned Jesus. In contemporary parlance I think the safest thing is to talk about Jesus as 'a man of colour'." This probably means olive-coloured, he says. [source]

---

No one took time to tell me that the picture of the blue eyed, blond haired 'Jesus' hanging from the wall in my parent's living room was actually the family member of some European artist from the 16th century who was commissioned by the leaders of the white church to paint the Son of God in the image of a white man in order to enslave and dominate the original people of the scriptures. So I grew up thinking that I was God's little nappy headed step child. [source]

---

". . . Jesus and his family spent more than a fleeting moment in Egypt. It is not inconceivable, for example, that Jesus might well have learned to walk and talk right here in Africa. Further, Jesus and his Jewish family, being Afro-Asiatic in colour and culture, would have appeared more chocolate-brown than Caucasian in complexion -- more like a typically miscegenated African American, Kenyan Kikuyu or South African 'coloured'." (Gosnell L. Yorke, "Biblical hermeneutics: an Afrocentric perspective", Religion and Theology 2/2 (1995), pp. 145-158; reproduced on-line at unisa.ac.za)

---

In the December 2002 edition of Popular Mechanics, Jesus was shown as looking like a typical Galilean Semite. Among the points made was that the Bible records that Jesus' disciple, Judas had to point him out to those arresting him. The implied argument being that if Jesus' physical appearance differed that markedly from his disciples, then he would have been relatively easy to identify. [source]

The image in question is the one shown here.
~Ed.

---

Conservative Christians generally believe in the inerrancy of the Bible. They accept the statements in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke that Mary was a virgin when Jesus was conceived. That is, Jesus' conception did not involve male sperm, This would imply that God either:

• Created an living embryo with a unique human DNA in one of Mary's fallopian tubes.
• Created special DNA which fertilized an ovum produced by Mary's body.
  

Thus, Jesus would have had DNA that was either 50% or 100% created uniquely by God. If so, then Jesus could have had any height, hair color, eye color, skin hue, style of nose, etc. He may or may not have resembled a typical Palestinian from 1st Century CE. [source]

---

Rethabile's editorial:
So this is what folks have been saying about the race and colour of Jesus of Nazareth. Will we ever know for sure? Do we care? I'd venture to say we probably don't. The deal, as far as I'm concerned, is that many of you out there will readily consider close to the truth this image, and not this one. Why is that, considering the region Jesus came from?

Science and computer programs say Jesus probably looked more like the image at the top of this post, than a blue-eyed, blond-haired man. So why is the world flooded with images of the latter and very few of the former? You tell me.

But I digress. I wanted to say that the deal for me is the fact that many use this ubiquitous image to fortify their personal beliefs about race: If even the Son of God is Caucasian, ... (please add the rest). As more and more "evidence" piles up about the probable appearance of Jesus, perhaps more than a few racists may look at other races differently, and perhaps with a little more respect.

We shouldn't really care what Jesus looked like; but now, all of us shouldn't care. And nobody should use whatever physical image of Jesus is floating around in art galleries to further their beliefs about mankind.

A picture is a strong message, and one that is easily registered and remembered (it speaks a thousand words). Given what we've been shown over the ages, does what scientists suggest as Jesus's image surprise you, shock you, revile you? Or none of the above? Care to tell us something about it?

Visit also: http://khanya.wordpress.com/2010/04/01/the-appearance-of-jesus-christ-redux/

I'm looking for a title for this poem. Will you help? Here it is:

You took up arms as one grabs
tools from a shed to till the garden up,
and with that gun went north
to learn how to grip it like the hand
of a friend you haven't seen in years.
Then back south you came,
with Somalia's hammer falling
in the early east, already,
past the magazine catch, then
the Nigerian trigger & its religion wars,
oil-burning regions where angry niggers
have had enough, down the slide
to the front sight. Your heart ticked
like a crazy clock when you saw
our left hand hacking and being hacked
by the right. Still, we rubbed the struggle
into our hair like oil, into our boots,
and with alcohol muffled laughter
till in the mouth, from the muzzle which is
southern Africa and signifies the puzzle's
last piece, hung a blood red rose.
© Rethabile Masilo

"After Baby After Baby" by Rachel Zucker

When we made love you had
the dense body of a Doberman
and the square head of a Rottweiler.

With my eyes closed I saw:
a light green plate with seared scallops
and a perfect fillet of salmon on a cedar plank.

Now I am safe in the deep V of a weekday
wanting to tell you how the world
is full of street signs and strollers
and pregnant women in spandex.

The bed and desk both want me.
The windows, the view, the idea of Paris.

With my minutes, I chip away at the idiom,
an unmarked pebble in a fast current. Later,
on my way to the store, a boy with a basketball
yells, You scared? to someone else, and the things
on the list to buy come home with me.
And the baby. And your body.

© Rachel Zucker

Musgum home in Cameroon

January Gill O'Neil and Erin Dionne

January Gill O'Neil and Erin Dionne on Magic 106.7's Boston Life from January O'Neil on Vimeo.

Altar, by Kwame Dawes

Human folly laced with humour

Saturday, 03 July 2010 15:06

Title: Not Another Day
Author: Julius Chingono
Reviewer: Phillip Chidavaenzi
2006: (pp: 124) 206 x 136 mm
ISBN 13: 9781779220486
ISBN 10: 1779220480

When I first heard of Julius Chingono, I didn't think much about him and what he did, as I'd never come across his literary works. So, what was the big deal? If he was worth a second look, I reasoned, then I would have heard of him before.
After reading Writing Still: New Stories from Zimbabwe (Weaver Press, 2003) soon after its publication, Chingono’s story, "Maria's Interview", was not one of those I revisited for a second read. It was just one of those stories.

Then I bumped into some of his poetry published on the Poetry International website, www.poetryinternational.org. Although I was amazed to realise that he was that good, maybe the fact that he had only published one novel, Chipo Changu (1978) and the award-winning play, Ruvimbo (1980), made me overlook his fine artistic touch.
[continue there...]

Some Chingono links:

1. Poem: False Tooth
2. Poem: Grapes
3. Poem: It Denotes
4. Poem reading: As I Go
5. Interviewing Julius Chingono