Shumpert’s Hair Takes On The Warriors, 2016
I am a fan of the game—truly—the small
ball in the almost-as-small-basket, the arc
(like Barthé’s carving: Boy With A Broom)
of the bouncer through the white threads,
beads of sweat on the game’s best or even
the least of those: bench players, the justin-
cases, and all the always-a-sixth men.
All off the charts, blood rush plus blood
rush. But when this man, this Shumpert
(bearing a family crest, coat of arms, surname
exhumed from Saxony or Bohemia;
variously called Schumann or Schumacher,
the immigrant who came to Germantown,
PA, 1685, with his wife, Sarah), this player
on a team the west coast just can’t abide,
comes on the ball court, nappy hair a square
askew to the left, wrapped up in a band,
or golden, braided, shaded, dreaded,
Pomeranian, afro, flattop, Chinese wudang
(death knot, knot of slain warriors), yet-tobe-
bald because has-he-ever-sported-apony-
tail? or even as Varajão, hair in check
to “can-this-stop-the-kink?”, curly-curly, flops
like a diver whose double-back dribbles off—
I have a momentary hurly-burly, at least until
a baby-faced Assassin shushes the masses, but
no swish/no splash, just Riley, ya like me now?
ξ
“Shumpert’s Hair Takes On The Warriors, 2016" first appeared in Black Renaissance Noire.
Lynne Thompson is the Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles. Thompson is the author of Start With a Small Guitar, Beg No Pardon, winner of the Perugia Book Award and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award, and Fretwork, selected by Jane Hirshfield for the Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize and published in 2019. Her recent work appears or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, New England Review, Massachusetts Review, Black Warrior Review, and Best American Poetry 2020 as well as the anthology Sh*t Men Say To Me.
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