Cornelius Eady
Withstand
What can you withstand, now?
What can you withstand?
All the fights they taught were right
Is shifting through your hands
All the birds exiled in the sky
Got no place to land.
What can you withstand, now?
What can you withstand?
The weathers trying to change
Your clothes,
A stale wind covers the land
Thunder rolls like an exit poll
Like some mad judge’s hand.
The ground beneath your feet
Is turning into sand
And it ain’t who’s gonna win
Or lose,
It’s what you can stand.
What can you withstand, now,
What can you withstand?
All the fights they taught were right
Are shifting through your hands
All the birds exiled in the sky
Got no place to land
What can you withstand, now
What can you withstand?
The weathers trying to change
Your mind,
Seems you made a mistake;
You thought you’d been
A citizen,
But now they claim you’re
A fake.
The ground beneath your feet
Is shifting into sand
And it ain’t who’s gonna
Rescue you,
It’s what you can stand.
What can you withstand, now,
What can you withstand?
All the fights you thought were right
Are shifting through your hands
All the birds exiled in the sky
Got no place to land.
What can you withstand, now,
What can you withstand?
CE: Words, music, and vocals
Charlie Rauh: Acoustic guitar
Lisa Liu: Piano
Tracks recored by Eady, Rauh & Liu
Arranged and mixed by Rauh & Liu
Mastered by Charlie Rauh
Poet/Playwright/Songwriter and Cave Canem Co-Founder Cornelius Eady was born in Rochester, NY in 1954, and is Professor of English, and John C. Hodges Chair of Excellence at the University of Tenn. Knoxville. In addition to his teaching duties at UT, from 2021-2022 he served as interim director at Poets House, a poetry library and cultural center located in New York City. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize; The Gathering of My Name, nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; Brutal Imagination, and Hardheaded Weather. He wrote the libretto to Diedra Murray’s opera Running Man, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Theatre in 1999, and his verse play Brutal Imagination won the Oppenheimer Prize in 2001. Eady’s pandemic folk song project Don’t Get Dead, recorded with his Trio, was released in 2021 by June Appal Recording. His work and songs has been featured on NPR, BBC Radio 4 and the PBS Newshour. His awards include fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, and Lifetime Achievement Awards in Poetry from The Poetry Foundation, The National Book Foundation, Brooklyn Poets, Poets and Writers Foundation, Furious Flower Foundation and the Lannan Foundation.
Indolent Books and editor Michael Broder are back with another poem-a-day series to help us process the renewed autocratic attack on our democracy. The series is currently counting down the last five days before Inauguration Day, then the count will resume with poem #1 and keep going as long as our democratic republic remains at risk, or until we end up in a gulag, whichever comes first.