Field Trip Shotokan

Let's workshop this poem about a sensei who takes his martial-arts class to a cattle farm for a field trip!

Field Trip Shotokan	

The afroed sensei in his baggy red gi
drops low in a front stance, Nike feet
burrowing into the straw. Left knee 
lunged forward with his left hand
tranquil on the caged steer’s snout, 
his right cocks back (fury charged
like Sho’nuff’s). Just one palm heel—
“Uh-sa!”—thumps the cattle skull.

Its tongue cartoons out to the side,
its cage keeping it standing in death.
“Shit” the littlest classmate whispers
(his very first curse). The queerness 
of seeing one another in sneakers 
while in gis (let alone among cattle)
now utterly eclipsed, Sensei Seevers 
moves to the next in line, snorting.

This poem is unpublished

Photo 1: This is Steve Sanders (now Sijo Saabir Quwi Muhammad). He was of course Jim Kelly’s teacher in the black karate school in Enter the Dragon

https://chinesemartialstudies.com/2016/01/21/our-fist-is-black-martial-arts-black-arts-and-black-power-in-the-1960s-and-1970s/

Photo 2: Here is one of Sho’nuff sites.google.com/site/dangerinternationalcampaign/home/the-cast/sho-nuff