Ishmael Reed – “dragon’s blood”

dragon’s blood

just because you
cant see d stones dont
mean im not building .
you aint no mason .  how
d fuck would you know .

One of my favorite poems is  “dragon’s blood,” by Ishmael Reed.   It appeared in his 1972 book, Conjure.  

Short, it satisfies one of the great advantages of poems: It is eminently portable.  I memorized it without trying, and have carried it around in my head for fifty years, like an old briefcase that reminds me of the past and yet contains rememberable things.  

Five lines with more or less five syllables each (4/5/5/6/5).   In street dialect, here the language many Black people use in daily life.  The poem comes to us without the capitalization or the ‘correct’ spelling one associates with intellectuals, with ‘poets.’  It is full of rhyme – ‘you/you/you,’ ‘d/d,’ ‘cant/dont/aint.’ ‘don’t/no,’ ‘no/how/know’ [the middle term and the final term being eye rhymes, the first and third being perfect or sounded rhymes, in this case an identical rhyme]. It has odd orthography, with no capitalization, spaces before periods, and no apostrophes to indicate contractions (cant, dont, im, aint).  This quality, odd orthography, marks it out as a poem of the ‘beat’ period of poetry, of the late 1950’s and the 1960’s and 1970’s.

Square in shape, this short lyric looks sort of like a brick or squarish stone, part of the mason’s stock in trade.  It is a brick, a foundation stone, part of what holds the building (poetry, identity) up, part in fact of its foundation.  (Houses can be built on supports, pillars of brick or stone that go deep into the ground and on which the whole structure of the house is built.)

The poem has three sentences.  The first, spanning three lines, is a statement and an observation.  The second is another statement, this time part observation and part accusation.  The third seems a question and an observation and a challenge.  But that final sentence, without any question mark, is an accusation and not actually a query.  It is an accusatory statement.  There is a “you” in this poem, right there in the first and fourth and last lines.  The poem directly addresses its reader.  It is about Reed – the “I” of ‘im” in the third line – and we who read the poem.  We don’t understand what poets, what black poets in particular, are doing.

What the poem speaks to us of is: Work, invisible work – but work nonetheless.  We can’t see the stones, but that, the poet tells us, does not mean he is not building.  We don’t have the knowledge or expertise (“you aint no mason”) to recognize what is going on.  And without that knowledge, we don’t know anything (“how/ d fuck would you know .”)

Those who claim to ‘see’ don’t see:  Things not obvious to ‘normal’ sight can take place even if ‘seeing’ does not see them.

In five short lines, Reed describes the invisible lives, and efforts, of those who are not seen.  Those lives, and their efforts to build things, are invisible because of a defect of sight.  Black people, people of all sorts but especially Black people, are not seen because the ‘seers’ of our culture, including readers of this poem, do not have the training and capacity to see what is happening.  A good mason knows there is building going on; the vast majority of people (white people, readers) do not see what is going on because so much is invisible to them.  But building goes on, whether people can see it or not.

Ralph Ellison wrote a long, wonderful novel called Invisible Man.  Its central point is that although that white people too often cannot see black people,  “even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play.” The entire novel is pithily summarized in Reed’s poem.

Blindness and sight, invisibility and actuality, seeming stasis and ongoing construction: All these major thematic oppositions are present in these five brief lines.  What Reed connotes is that there is a Black world that white observers cannot see, that making a self and making a life are – like building a house – construction projects that are ongoing even as the evidence of such makings is not obvious to all who think they see.  

Pretty good stuff for a five line poem that lacks conventional imagery and has only one figure of speech in it.  (A symbol: House building and the masons who build houses stand for making a life, shaping an identity, changing the world.) 

The poem registers with us because we all know it is true.  Things happen even when ‘observers’ cannot see them happen, since what happens both within and without (sometimes outside the limitations of conventional thought) does, in fact, happen.  We all, regardless of race, know that construction and growth can take place where the world cannot see: Inside.  Some people, primarily outsiders, know that even though construction in the ‘real’ or shared world takes place, many do not see the building that is going on.  Because so many self-censor and yet trust to their ‘sight,’ they cannot see.  Construction takes place not only inside the self, unseen, but in the real world, unseen but nonetheless real.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t focus, in part, of the transgressive “fuck” in the final line.  There is anger here, rejection of the reader.  There is also a positivity in that word, for it challenges the reader to acknowledge his or her blindness.  What Reed, the speaker of the poem, is telling us is that he is building: And that our inability to see what the speaker is constructing is owing to our blindness.  He is building.

How can we know what is happening in our world if we do not have the knowledge or craft to see, clearly, what is happening?  So much that is invisible is actually construction work – as I said, of identity and a new and more humane order – that takes place even though the sight of many is so impaired that they cannot see.  What is clearly going on is invisible – not clear, at all – to those who are blind. 

Much of what transpires in our world, in this historical moment, is an effort to make those who are sightless, who lack knowledge, see what their blindness or lack of knowledge has precluded them from seeing.  Masons build; knowing what a mason is and does and how he does it, are the precondition to knowing that real construction has been taking place before our unseeing eyes.