M. Bennett Hooper

Ms. Hooper says about herself, she's "a fairly literate opinionated 65 year old survivor whose life has been influenced by many courageous personalities from all walks of life. Most of all my major influences after parents have been writers, and teachers. I can't begin to list them all so I won't list any."   She won the July Poetry Slam hosted by Memphis Sound & Syllable and has begun spoken word appearances in Memphis, TN. "I shall tape a one half hour interview and poetry reading on community access television. One has to start somewhere. I waited until I turned 65 to get the courage to just scream."

You can read more about her at http://www.authorsden.com/visit/author.asp?AuthorID=7273

THE PIPER IS HERE
C.2003 M. BENNETT HOOPER

The piper is here and you are not dancing because
You have become drunken on victimization.
The piper is here and you are not dancing because
You have become drunken on oppression.
The piper is here and you are not dancing because
You have abandoned your future
which is embodied in your children.

The piper is here and you are not dancing because
You must now pay the bill for your social indiscretion
Via mis-education, via incarceration, via self and soul
Mutilation, via physical violation as you
march towards the ovens of your latest holocaust
Which is an enemy of old first venereal disease and now
AIDS.

The piper is here and you are not dancing because
Black men and women close their eyes in denial
as if ignorance and death will pass them by.
The piper is here and you are not dancing because
To dance means you must hear the music,
The music of love which leaps from the pens and lips of poets
who are tired of weeping mothers, wives, elders, and children.
To dance means you must accept the mantle of responsibility
And stop begging Pharaoh to let your people go
Especially since we have become Pharaoh once more.

The piper is here and you are not dancing because
You follow too quickly that which is designed to destroy you.
So you dance to the tunes of self hatred via not knowing
who you really are but more than the lack of knowledge
Not caring.
The piper is here and you are not dancing because
You can’t believe the beauty that lies hidden beneath your own
Black self.

The piper is here and you are not dancing because
You are afraid of love, me and yourself whom
You fear to trust.
For the promise of the elders lies embedded in
The pursuit of excellence ,by you, for you, and because of you.
That is our latest and only freedom song and fight.
The piper is here and you must decide Black people
To dance or die.

Playtime is over, the children are watching.
Must they become you.
We elders are dying. We elders are dying..
The pipe grows heavy upon our lips.
The piper is here and it is your turn
and time to dance.

I am a piper.

VISIONS OF AN OLD WOMAN
C.2003 M. BENNETT HOOPER

Old men make war and young men make babies and one wonders if that does not translate into envy at a level never before spoken.
Which is why in my fantasy and under my government the old men who make war would be marched upon an open field as their armies watched and permitted no required to fight each other to the death.
Twenty or more old men killing themselves and each other might abolish the need for war.
Combatants would march upon the field in groups of twenty to a kill much like the gladiators of a more barbaric past as young men watch for a new survivor.

The power mad and the power hungry could next take the field and killing could be reduced to hundreds instead of hundreds of thousands.
Body counts would be mandatory until those watching remember Moses’ instructions to the Levites to kill father, brother, and kin for evil transgressions against God.
For all wars in the carnal are intrinsically evil when one forgets who the real profiteers are.
Evil is no respecter of alleged religious persuasions for it abounds everywhere
In The Christian, The Moslem, The Jew, The Buddhist, The Hindu, The Sikh, The Taoist, The Atheist and yes even you and I are tainted with impurities.

So I ask you parents of the young will you join in my vision and send the old men off to war.
The old men who harbor hatred as if it was ever anything more than genocide’s tool.
The old men for whom the death angel awaits closer than they can comfortably bear.
The old men who dream dreams of I remember as they become piranhas tearing at the flesh of youth which screams I am the product of a new vision.
The old men who finance biological poison and germs to kill humanity.

Do you not realize that AIDS was the result of a man made virus?
Do you not remember the Tuskegee experiment?
Do you not remember the slaughter of African-American soldiers on American soil.
Do you not remember Pearl Harbor?
Do you not remember the destruction of the library at Alexandria which housed over 300,000 papyrus scrolls?
Do you not remember the Spanish Inquisition?
The Salem witch trials?
The holocaust in Germany?
The Trail of tears, and the blankets contaminated with smallpox which were given to Native Americans?
Do you not remember Sennacherib and Egypt?
Do you not remember Servius Tullius, a Roman emperor who started the class system based upon property?
Do you not remember the German and Polish war?
Not World War II but the German Polish war of 1003.

Do you not recognize the face of the enemy?
He is old, he is power mad, he is greedy, he is vicious,
he is covetous, he is deadly, and he is not just White or Asian, or Black.
He is everyman who seeks to destroy other men for no other reasons
Save greed, brutality, and fear of victim payback.

He is an old man as old as time itself
And it is time we demand that he
Bite the dust of his creation and he alone fight his contemporaries.
Those twenty odd other old men whose dreams of glory are never realized without war and the slaughter of young men and women everywhere and in every country.
What will I fight for as an old woman?
My unprotected babies of every hue who have no idea that the emperors are indeed without clothing.
 

EVIL EYED GRANDMA
C.2003 M. BENNETT HOOPER
Aka mariond hooper


Do you ever wonder why Grandma’s who always sang gospel songs and
Rolled Bible verses off their tongues like melting honey also had an evil eye?
Like the time Leroy rolled on the floor laughing until he got close enough to
High sitting Miss Thelma and tried to look under her dress.
Well Grandma gave him the evil eye and his laughter turned into
The whooping cough sure as you are born to die.

Or the time Lou Ella’s daughter Princess got pregnant at fourteen and
Lou Ella said the baby’s daddy was Johnny James Oliver
Instead of her no good boyfriend Joe Willie Thompson.
Grandma told her to stop lying on Johnny James and send Joe Willie
one of two places to the graveyard or the penitentiary.
Well she gave Lou Ella that evil eye and don’t you know
Lou Ella stole big daddy’s shot gun to go hunting.
Joe Willie heard she was out hunting him and run away to new Orleans.
He went down there and got cut up by one of them Louisiana women.

Nobody that knew Grandma wanted to receive her evil eye
because Grandma was a Louisiana woman tried and true.
Grandma used to say the only thing worse than a Louisiana woman was a Louisiana man after a scalding.
Most of Grandma’s family was glad when she got saved but it sure was
Puzzling that she never stopped carrying that pistol in her pocketbook
Along with a rabbit’s foot and a sprig of mint.

Grandma told us that when she died
she wanted her rabbits’ foot put in the box with her.
I remember the wake night like it was yesterday.
Lou Ella was snorting and shouting , and pulling on her hair piece so hard
It fell right off in grandma’s face
and she was too scared of Grandma to pick it up.
The glue on Grandma’s left eye popped open.
Lou Ella messed on herself and fell out
Janie who said she wasn‘t going to put no rabbit foot
In Grandma‘s casket called Mr. Stennet the undertaker and told him to
Close Grandma‘s eye and put that damn rabbit foot in the casket.
And Grandma‘s evil eye closed for the last time