The Sailor, the Soldier,
the Savior
Thomas Kneeland
That blue & white ‘89 F-150
carried us across the country
from redwoods to magnolias
where fires were little until they
used us Black folx to put them out.
& that mountain of a man,
my grandfather,
never erupted
never blew a fuse
never took long breaks, until dusk
fell into a slumber heavy enough
to cover him like a weighted
blanket, as he sunk into the velvet
couch he would sleep on
for the next seventeen years.
I learned how to be his hero,
a companion soldier in a battle
he couldn’t fight alone,
where the logs of his legs
were just as heavy as the ships
that sailed in on the shores
of his bloodstream,
dropping poison off
at the port of entry.
One day, the ships stopped coming
& he stood on the shoreline,
his four-fingered fist striking the air,
and said, I told you I wasn’t goin’ nowhere.
Thomas Kneeland is a poet, educator, community leader, and visual artist. He is author of the chapbook, We Be Walkin’ Blackly in the Deep (Marian University), and one of ten 2022 Frontier Poetry Global Poetry Prize finalists for the continent of Africa. He is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Elevation Review. His poetry is published or forthcoming in Up the Staircase Quarterly, South Florida Poetry Journal, INverse Poetry Archives, Rigorous Magazine, and elsewhere. Kneeland holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Butler University and was recently awarded a Speculative Play and Just Futurities residency from the Indianapolis Arts and Humanities Institute at Indiana University-Indianapolis.