Dreadlocks

Sometimes a poem is not only full of insight but also information. Here's a poem by
William Matthews which I typed from "Ploughshares" Winter 1994 issue

Bob Marley’s Hair

The dreadlocks had all fallen off
from chemotherapy, and so
when Marley died in Switzerland
they flew the body in the hold

to Kingston, where he would lie
in state, or in the anti-state he’d
written all those hymns for, his face
ironed into repose and sweet,

Or bland if sweet couldn’t be done.
“Baldheads” is what Rasta call
white people. The body needed not
just hair, but the corkscrewed waterfall

in all the photographs, the coiled crown
he could fling that would spring back,
the curtain he could part or close,
his proud tatters. No wig could fake that.

So on the same flight Marley’s
mother rode home with his dreadlocks.
Thirty-eight thousand feet they reached, and then
came down, On her lap, in a box.