Poem: Prageeta Sharma + Mendi & Keith Obadike's Sour Thunder on iTunes

Because baseball season is about to begin and because today is the first day of National Poetry Month (every day should be a "poetry" day, but...), here's a poem by Prageeta Sharma, whose first book, The Opening Question, won the 2004 Fence Modern Poets Series.

ADVANCE

There are baseball threats and there are baseball Jaunts
as there are baseball careers, credit cards and juice,
pilgrims plumb fires to burn their lanterns--
full moon, not tawdry but sentient, not consciousness
but wonder, charms bat cave.

The bats exist as brownnosers perhaps aching to inch
at the heart palpitations of adulthood without the exclusion
of free speech, there are soldiers who ride themselves over to the park.

There are shot nerves and window dressings,
wince a little for a treat and that's home plate,
venues of marketplace and trees inducted into
a hall of name, an effulgence reflected in a half-turn
or a bit of lumber, a dry cry from baseball.

Copyright © Prageeta Sharma, 2004.

≥≥≥

Speaking of the oral/aural arts, multigenre artists Mendi Obadike's and Keith Obadike's (at right, with musician and chemist Koo Nimo at Kwame Nkrumah Science and Technology University in Kumasi, Ghana, photo © Keith + Mendi Obadike) internet opera and sonic book The Sour Thunder, which premiered at Yale in live and netcast form, and which I got to see at the Studio Museum in Harlem, is now available for download at Apple's iTunes music store.

Mendi writes:

I'm happy to say that Bridge Records just put my album The Sour Thunder out on iTunes. It's a mix of songs and poems, including "Trouble" and "Even the Magnolia" from Armor and Flesh.*

The entire album, which is classified under "Hip Hop/Rap," is available at the iTunes store for $9.99.
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*Mendi's debut collection received the 2004 Naomi Long Madgett Award and is published by Lotus Press (Detroit).