World AIDS Day Tribute - Essex Hemphill

Poet, editor, and activist Essex Hemphill was born April 16, 1957, in Chicago, Illinois. He was raised in Southeast Washington, DC, and began to write poems at the age of fourteen. He was educated at the University of Maryland.

Hemphill's first books were the self-published chapbooks Earth Life (1985) and Conditions (1986). He first gained national attention when his work appeared in the anthology In the Life (1986), a seminal collection of writings by Black gay men. In 1989, his poems were featured in the award-winning documentaries Tongues Untied and Looking for Langston.

In 1991, Hemphill edited Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men, which won a Lambda Literary Award. In 1992, he released Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry, which won the National Library Association's Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual New Author Award. His poems appeared in Obsidian, Black Scholar, Callaloo, Painted Bride Quarterly, Essence, and numerous other newspapers and journals. His work also appeared in numerous anthologies including Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time (1986) and Life Sentences: Writers, Artists and AIDS (1993). He was a visiting scholar at The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in 1993. On November 4, 1995, Hempill died from complications relating to AIDS.

From Poetry.org


Conditions XIV
Essex Hemphill


You left me begging for things
most men thought they had below their belts.
I was reaching higher.
I could throw my legs up like satellites
but I knew I was fucking fallen angels.
I made them feel like demigods.
I believed my mission
to be a war zone duty:
don't create casualties,
heal them.
But I was the wounded
almost dead.
Helping the uninjured.
Men whose lusty hearts
weakened in the middle of the night
and brought them to tears, to their knees
for their former lovers.
They could look at me and tell
they did not want to endure
what beauty love scars give me.
So touch me now --
Hannibal, Toussaint.
I am a revolution without bloodshed.
I change the order of things
to suit my desperations.
You can raise your legs,
almost touch heaven.
I can be an angel,
falling.