Quincy Troupe: The Wait
The Wait
©1970 Quincy Troupe
all along the rail road tracks of texas old train cars lay rusted and overturned like new african governments long forgotten by the people who built and rode them till they couldn't run no more, they reminded me of old race horses who’ve been put out too pasture too lay amongst the weeds rain sleet and snow till they die and rot away, they also reminded me of fading pictures in grandma’s picture book of old black men in mississippi who sit on dreary delapidated porches, porches that are falling away like a dead mans skin, like a white mans eyes, and on the peeling photos the old men sit there, sad-eyed and waiting, waiting for the worms and the undeniable dust to come put their claims on them and they sit there, non-thinking of the master, and his long forgotten (even by himself, firstly by himself) promise of forty acres of landscape and even now, if you pass across this bleeding flesh of everchanging landscape, you will see in the cities, the stretching countryside old black men and young black men, sittin’ on porches, waiting, waiting for the rusted trains that rot amongst the texas grass