Leap Day Black History Month POETRY!

To O. E. A.
~Claude McKay

Your voice is the color of a robin’s breast,
     And there’s a sweet sob in it like rain—still rain in the night.
Among the leaves of the trumpet-tree, close to his nest,
     The pea-dove sings, and each note thrills me with strange delight
Like the words, wet with music, that well from your trembling throat.
          I’m afraid of your eyes, they’re so bold,
          Searching me through, reading my thoughts, shining like gold.
But sometimes they are gentle and soft like the dew on the lips of the eucharis
Before the sun comes warm with his lover’s kiss,
    You are sea-foam, pure with the star’s loveliness,
Not mortal, a flower, a fairy, too fair for the beauty-shorn earth,
All wonderful things, all beautiful things, gave of their wealth to your birth:
      O I love you so much, not recking of passion, that I feel it is wrong,
          But men will love you, flower, fairy, non-mortal spirit burdened with flesh,
Forever, life-long.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on February 16, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Oh NO... almost the end of February, Black History Month POETRY

Outcast
 ~Claude McKay

For the dim regions whence my fathers came
My spirit, bondaged by the body, longs.
Words felt, but never heard, my lips would frame;
My soul would sing forgotten jungle songs.
I would go back to darkness and to peace,
But the great western world holds me in fee,
And I may never hope for full release
While to its alien gods I bend my knee.
Something in me is lost, forever lost,
Some vital thing has gone out of my heart,
And I must walk the way of life a ghost
Among the sons of earth, a thing apart;
For I was born, far from my native clime,
Under the white man’s menace, out of time.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on July 7, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, Black History Month Edition

Still Waiting
 ~Harryette Mullen

for Alison Saar

Please approach with care these figures in black.
Regard with care the weight they bear,
                         the scars that mark their hearts.
Do you think you can handle these bodies of graphite & coal dust?
This color might rub off. A drop of this red liquid
                         could stain your skin.
This black powder could blow you sky high.
No ordinary pigments blacken our blues.
Would you mop the floor with this bucket of blood?
Would you rinse your soiled laundry in this basin of tears?
Would you suckle hot milk from this cracked vessel?
Would you be baptized in this fountain of funky sweat?
Please approach with care
                         these bodies still waiting to be touched.
We invite you to come closer.
We permit you to touch & be touched.
We hope you will engage with care.

Copyright © 2019 Harryette Mullen. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 2, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets

Oh the POWER, Black History Month POETRY

Nothingness
 ~Dawn Lundy Martin

I don’t want to say anything. What is it to be saying? Force speech, rape speech. I have no subjectivity or light subjectivity. Speaking, defunct. Land mass floats. And the forests have been felled. And the antlers, snapped. Morphed lips, already sewn. Most of us are keen to mouth the word, “beast.” Everyone is talking talking talking like dentures, clack clack, but nothing is really said. Or so much chatter static. I am not saying anything either, am waiting and breathing. My body is speaking. Expressing the thingness of the thing. It chats at me, motoring. In the taxi, a tree shaped purple fragrance floats across face.


--


To be a red
scratch or
red scotch,
depending on
your liking,

calculation
of the sublime, or
the sublime itself—

Memory fixed—
—and
then splatter.
My mother in
her pink kitchen
washes what
the garden
and its grey
chemicals produced.
Outside, the gate
ajar, the dog
run wild-ing. A thing
called girl splay,
or wheat heart.
We could draw
a chalk line there.

This is not conceptual. This is a poem. You are a poem. I am.

The hesitancy.
The undoingness.

More secrets: humiliation as release.

The men all say “I want to stretch you out,” feel themselves big in this small corner of the world. How chivalrous, the ache of any obvious sliding down. What would the poem be without wings to block out the light?

Copyright © 2019 Dawn Lundy Martin. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 5, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

Black History Month POETRY

Down By the Carib Sea (VI: Sunset in the Tropics)
 ~James Weldon Johnson

A silver flash from the sinking sun,
Then a shot of crimson across the sky
That, bursting, lets a thousand colors fly
And riot among the clouds; they run,
Deepening in purple, flaming in gold,
Changing, and opening fold after fold,
Then fading through all of the tints of the rose into gray.
Till, taking quick fright at the coming night,
They rush out down the west,
In hurried quest
Of the fleeing day.

Now above where the tardiest color flares a moment yet,
One point of light, now two, now three are set
To form the starry stairs,—
And, in her firefly crown,
Queen Night, on velvet slippered feet, comes softly down.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on August 4, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

Black History POETRY Month

color bleeding
 ~Evie Shockley

one year, i carried the blues around
like a baby. sure, my coffee mugs cupped

amethysts :: water gushed, rose-tinted
and -scented, from the faucets at my touch ::
the air orange with butterflies that never

left me. meanwhile, indigo held fast
to my toes :: lapis lapped my fingertips ::

and a hue the shade of mermaid scales
bolted through my hair like lightning.

my eyelids drooped, fell, heavy with sky.
that year i carried the blues around

left me mean :: while indigo held fast,
the daily news tattooed azure to my back.
true, festivals of lilies buoyed me. but what

good could white do? the blues grow like
shadows in late sun :: stretch  creep  run.

Copyright © 2019 Evie Shockley. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 12, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

Black History POETRY Month

The Second Beautiful Harvest
 ~Dante Micheaux

I wake in the golden belly of this abode
and sense some diurnal grace at work.
I take my body to the fall, to bathe
and anoint my genitals with shea.
I have made my journey to the cold hills
to commune with my people there.
I come for the second beautiful harvest
and have waited long to look into its eye.
The harvest hosts libations, the meal
and my desire—so I drink the deep
heady liquid of its languid stare, under
the hum of many voices: burgeoning
friendships and reunion in the low light.
I break into the soft weirdness of injera
and dip my fingers into the meat stew,
to celebrate the glory of the kings.
The clear splendor of the serving boy,
his slow blink as of a camel, does not
distract me—here to reap but seduced
by the second beautiful harvest.

Copyright © 2019 Dante Micheaux. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 14, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

SWEET ... Black History Poetry

Dreams
 ~Paul Laurence Dunbar

Dream on, for dreams are sweet:
      Do not awaken!
Dream on, and at thy feet
      Pomegranates shall be shaken.

Who likeneth the youth
      of life to morning?
’Tis like the night in truth,
      Rose-coloured dreams adorning.

The wind is soft above,
      The shadows umber.
(There is a dream called Love.)
      Take thou the fullest slumber!

In Lethe’s soothing stream,
      Thy thirst thou slakest.
Sleep, sleep; ’tis sweet to dream.
      Oh, weep then thou awakest!

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on August 17, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

Not Poetry Thursday, Black History Month POETRY!

[we are]
 ~Quenton Baker

we are
prayer in the long boat

                                                       a rhizomatic scream
                                                       surrounded by the dark dagger
                                                                                     of the ocean

                            scripture
                            in its entirety
                            is anticipation of the lilt
                                                           and yet


there is no word
for the rhythm
               we endure
               across this dirtless moment

                                                           antibird, we sing like birds
                                                           textured and untrained

             rugged the love
             that claps
in the chasm of our black palms

Copyright © 2019 Quenton Baker. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 28, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, Black History Month Edition

Fractured
~Hali Sofala-Jones

My grandmother is only one day
into her infirmity and doped up
on Morphine. Her shoulder is immobile

beneath layers of plaster.
Her eighty-five-year-old frame droops
from the weight of it.

My mother confesses:
she cannot take care of her mother.
I am not she says a nursemaid.

My mother is angry. Angry
at my sister who didn’t give enough
support, angry at my grandmother

for shuffling her feet, angry even
at the dog that was tucked beneath
my grandmother’s arm

as they all three tried to squeeze
into the door of the vet’s office.
She calls me from the emergency room

to say that grandmother fractured her shoulder
in three places. She’s become an invalid
overnight, she says. My sister calls her cruel

for refusing to run the bathwater, refusing
to wash my grandmother’s naked body, for
not even considering renting

a wheelchair for her to move from place
to place. When grandmother whispers
that she is afraid to walk, my mother

tells her that there’s nothing wrong with
her legs, tells her she’ll have to go to a
nursing home if she won’t walk

to the bathroom: one piss in the bed is
understandable, two is teetering too
close to in-home care.

My sister does not understand that there
is too much to overcome between them—
always the memory of the black dress

grandmother refused to wear
on the day of her husband’s funeral—
the way she turned to my mother and said,

I am not in mourning.

Copyright © 2019 Hali Sofala-Jones. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 6, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

The Movie Pledge

Way back when (2015), the Academy saw fit to nominate no movies or actors who were appreciably African American or any other ethnicity that was not white. Folks called out the Academy with the hashtag #oscarssowhite. Knowing that we need to take personality responsibility around this issue instead of just being outraged lest the Academy slip back into their whiteness, I made a pledge that year.

I pledged to not *pay* for any movie (including others inviting me and paying) that did not have at least one lead actor who was not white.

I extended that pledge to not watching any TV show that did not have at least one lead character played by a not white actor.

The pledge is limiting ... and sometimes what I am able to watch is less than satisfying.

I am into this pledge a full five years now ... and I have noticed that TV folks have figured out that some of us want more than white leads.

This year, in particular, a bunch of new shows not only had all non-white leads (Party of Five reboot, for example), but several had super diverse casts (Nancy Drew, The Deputy), including out and proud LGBTQ, though sadly light on trans except for Pose.

Movies, however, have not caught up.

I have some thoughts on this I will share as soon as I can get some time to write.

***links above track the #oscarssowhite from 2016 to now

Black History Month POETRY!

White Things
 ~Anne Spencer

Most things are colorful things—the sky, earth, and sea.
                  Black men are most men; but the white are free!
White things are rare things; so rare, so rare
They stole from out a silvered world—somewhere.
Finding earth-plains fair plains, save greenly grassed,
They strewed white feathers of cowardice, as they passed;
                 The golden stars with lances fine
                 The hills all red and darkened pine,
They blanched with their wand of power;
And turned the blood in a ruby rose
To a poor white poppy-flower.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on September 29, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

Not Poetry Thursday ... Black History Month

The Restoration
 ~Gary Jackson

We drank coffee and got ready,
listened to 93.3 during our commute

to take our mind off how
every day we die on tv. Every day

down the block, kids in surgical masks
spraypaint Magneto was Right on street signs

and new storefronts waiting to redeem
spa resort passes and avocado toast dreams

until they, too, are forced out of business.
Or not. People can surprise you

like beating cancer or criminal charges,
the 2016 election, the high cost

of middle shelf liquor with a decent view.
If you want to succeed, let them see you

coming, our mothers once said before asking
if we wanted the switch or the belt.

But a whooping beats sitting
at the rooftop bar looking over the steepled skyline

and feeling the pang of worlds we’d rather be,
with two empty seats right beside us

that stay empty for the next two hours
surrounded by people drinking & eating

standing up—the wind threatening
to blow their hats off their sunburned heads.

Somewhere right now
there are two people looking for those seats.

We keep hoping they’ll find them—
find us. Let’s have another drink,

watch the muted news above
a row of decent bourbon, 
  
wait to hear, to see
if they make it to us or turn up on tv.

Copyright © 2019 by Gary Jackson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 9, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

Black History Poetry Month!

Hundreds of Purple Octopus Moms Are Super Weird, and They’re Doomed
 ~January Gill O’Neil
                                                           I'd like to be under the sea
                                                          In an octopus' garden in the shade.
                                                            —Ringo Starr


The article called it “a spectacle.” More like a garden than a nursery:
hundreds of purple octopuses protecting clusters of eggs
while clinging to lava rocks off the Costa Rican coast.
I study the watery images: thousands of lavender tentacles
wrapped around their broods. Did you know there’s a female octopus
on record as guarding her clutch for 53 months? That’s four-and-a-half
           years
of sitting, waiting, dreaming of the day her babies hatch and float
                     away.
I want to tell my son this. He sits on the couch next to me clutching his
          phone,
setting up a hangout with friends. The teenage shell is hard to crack.
Today, my heart sits with the brooding octomoms: not eating, always
             on call,
always defensive, living in stasis in waters too warm to sustain them.
No guarantees they will live beyond the hatching. Not a spectacle but a miracle any of us survive.

Copyright © 2019 by January Gill O’Neil. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 7, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets

Black History Month Poetry - Feb 16

Magnitude and Bond
 ~Nicole Terez Dutton

More than anything, I need this boy
so close to my ears, his questions

electric as honeybees in an acreage
of goldenrod and aster. And time where

we are, slow sugar in the veins
of white pine, rubbery mushrooms

cloistered at their feet. His tawny
listening at the water’s edge, shy

antlers in pooling green light, while
we consider fox prints etched in clay.

I need little black boys to be able to be
little black boys, whole salt water galaxies

in cotton and loudness—not fixed
in stunned suspension, episodes on hot

asphalt, waiting in the dazzling absence
of apology. I need this kid to stay mighty

and coltish, thundering alongside
other black kids, their wrestle and whoop,

the brightness of it—I need for the world
to bear it. And until it will, may the trees

kneel closer, while we sit in mineral hush,
together. May the boy whose dark eyes

are an echo of my father’s dark eyes,
and his father’s dark eyes, reach

with cupped hands into the braided
current. The boy, restless and lanky, the boy

for whom each moment endlessly opens,
for the attention he invests in the beetle’s

lacquered armor, each furrowed seed
or heartbeat, the boy who once told me

the world gives you second chances, the boy
tugging my arm, saying look, saying now.

Copyright © 2019 by Nicole Terez Dutton. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 25, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

POETRY! Black History Month

Octopus Empire
 ~Marilyn Nelson

What if the submarine
is praying for a way
it can poison the air,
In which some of them have
leaped for a few seconds,
felt its suffocating
rejected buoyancy.
Something floats above their
known world leading a wake
of uncountable death.
What if they organized
into a rebellion?

Now scientists have found
a group of octopi
who seem to have a sense
of community, who
live in dwellings made of
gathered pebbles and shells,
who cooperate, who
defend an apparent
border. Perhaps they’ll have
a plan for the planet
in a millennium
or two. After we’re gone.

Copyright © 2019 by Marilyn Nelson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 20, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

Happy Valentine's Day, Black History Month Poetry Edition

Love is a Flame
 ~George Marion McClellan

Love is a flame that burns with sacred fire, 
And fills the being up with sweet desire;
Yet, once the altar feels love’s fiery breath,
The heart must be a crucible till death.

Say love is life; and say it not amiss, 
That love is but a synonym for bliss.
Say what you will of love—in what refrain, 
But knows the heart, ‘tis but a word for pain.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on October 20, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

Black History Month ... Tuesday Poetry!

Morning on Shinnecock
~Olivia Ward Bush-Banks

The rising sun had crowned the hills,
   And added beauty to the plain;
O grand and wondrous spectacle!
  That only nature could explain.

I stood within a leafy grove,
  And gazed around in blissful awe;
The sky appeared one mass of blue,
  That seemed to spread from sea to shore.

Far as the human eye could see,
  Were stretched the fields of waving corn.
Soft on my ear the warbling birds
  Were heralding the birth of morn.

While here and there a cottage quaint
  Seemed to repose in quiet ease
Amid the trees, whose leaflets waved
  And fluttered in the passing breeze.

O morning hour! so dear thy joy,
  And how I longed for thee to last;
But e’en thy fading into day
  Brought me an echo of the past.

’Twas this,—how fair my life began;
  How pleasant was its hour of dawn;
But, merging into sorrow’s day,
  Then beauty faded with the morn.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on November 23, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, Black History Month

Let Me Not Lose My Dream
 ~Georgia Douglas Johnson

Let me not lose my dream, e'en though I scan the veil
      with eyes unseeing through their glaze of tears,
Let me not falter, though the rungs of fortune perish
      as I fare above the tumult, praying purer air,
Let me not lose the vision, gird me, Powers that toss
      the worlds, I pray!
Hold me, and guard, lest anguish tear my dreams away!

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on December 8, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, Black History Month

Altitude
 ~Cyrus Cassells

You’ve just died in my arms,
But suddenly it seems we’re eternal

Cali boys, Afro-haired cohorts in crime,
Racing through intricate lattices

Of quince and lemon tree shadows,
Corridors of Queen Anne’s lace—

On the skip-church Sunday you dubbed me
“Sir Serious” instead of Cyrus—

Then, swift as a deer’s leap, we’re devotees
Of goatees and showy Guatemalan shirts,

Intoxicated lovers for a month
On the northwest coast of Spain—

Praising the irrepressible sounds
Of a crusty Galician bagpiper

On La Coruña’s gripping finisterre,
Then gossiping and climbing

(Like the giddy Argonauts we were)
The lofty, ancient Roman lighthouse,

All the way—Keep on truckin’, we sang—
To the top of the Tower of Hercules—

Copyright © 2019 by Cyrus Cassells. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 30, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, Black History Month

Hello
 ~Sean Hill

She, being the midwife
and your mother’s
longtime friend, said
I see a heart; can you
see it? And on the grey
display of the ultrasound
there you were as you were,
our nugget, in that moment
becoming a shrimp
or a comma punctuating
the whole of my life, separating
its parts—before and after—,
a shrimp in the sea
of your mother, and I couldn’t
help but see the fast
beating of your heart
translated on that screen
and think and say to her,
to the room, to your mother,
to myself It looks like
a twinkling star.
I imagine I’m not
the first to say that either.
Unlike the first moments
of my every day,
the new of seeing you was the first
—deserving of the definite article—
moment I saw a star
at once so small and so
big, so close and getting closer
every day, I pray.

Copyright © 2019 by Sean Hill. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 13, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, Black History Month

Yearnings For Home
 ~Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

Oh let me go I’m weary here
And fevers scorch my brain,
I long to feel my native air
Breathe o’er each burning vein.

I long once more to see
My home among the distant hills,
To breathe amid the melody
Of murmering brooks and rills.

My home is where eternal snow
Round threat’ning craters sleep,
Where streamlets murmer soft and low
And playful cascades leap.

Tis where glad scenes shall meet
My weary, longing eye;
Where rocks and Alpine forests greet
The bright cerulean sky.

Your scenes are bright I know,
But there my mother pray’d,
Her cot is lowly, but I go
To die beneath its shade.

For, Oh I know she’ll cling
‘Round me her treasur’d long,
My sisters too will sing
Each lov’d familiar song.

They’ll soothe my fever’d brow,
As in departed hours,
And spread around my dying couch
The brightest, fairest flowers.

Then let me go I’m weary here
And fevers scorch my brain,
I long to feel my native air,
Breathe o’er each burning vein.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on December 15, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, Black History Month

Unruly
 ~Jari Bradley

Hushed whispers in an undisclosed room
            Take it out of the girl
a child, boyish in nature                     their smallness magnified.

Outcasted—the soft bodied animal you are
determined unruly animalia,
                                                    what survives inflation & inertia?

The body is a set of complex feedback systems
nothing is as it appears
                                                   the coexistence of a beard & breasts
                                                   evidence of the body’s willfully defiant
                                                       nature

The body’s resilience amid the promise of perish:
                                              somehow the child survives their own hand
                                              the day’s weary edge inverted toward grace

A child, boyish in their nature           & barrel shaped
            survives sedimented against the residue
            of dunes, soil, leaf litter,         & the bodies of a lesser

What couldn’t be excised
            your boyish nature
            your untamed phylum,         your small heart pulsing loud
                                                               notes against the night.

Copyright © 2020 by Jari Bradley. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 8, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, Black History Month

A Far Country
~Leslie Pinckney Hill

Beyond the cities I have seen,
Beyond the wrack and din,
There is a wide and fair demesne
Where I have never been.

Away from desert wastes of greed,
Over the peaks of pride,
Across the seas of mortal need
Its citizens abide.

And through the distance though I see
How stern must be the fare,
My feet are ever fain to be
Upon the journey there.

In that far land the only school
The dwellers all attend
Is built upon the Golden Rule,
And man to man is friend.

No war is there nor war’s distress,
But truth and love increase—
It is a realm of pleasantness,
And all her paths are peace.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on January 12, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, Black History Month

Thoughts
 ~Myra Viola Wilds

What kind of thoughts now, do you carry
   In your travels day by day
Are they bright and lofty visions,
   Or neglected, gone astray?

Matters not how great in fancy,
    Or what deeds of skill you’ve wrought;
Man, though high may be his station,
    Is no better than his thoughts.

Catch your thoughts and hold them tightly,
   Let each one an honor be;
Purge them, scourge them, burnish brightly,
   Then in love set each one free.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on January 18, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, Black History Month

Sophia the Robot Contemplates Beauty
 ~Safiya Sinclair

As a girl I held the hind
legs of the small and terrified, wanted
the short-fur and the wet meat furrowing.

Wanted the soft cry of the quavering
boy at primary school, rockstone

mashed up against his tender head,
the sick milk of us poor ones sucked
clean from a Government-issued plastic bag.

At lunchtime children were lethal
and precise, a horde hurling “Ben-foot”
at she who was helpless and I

waking too-surprised to hear my own
cruel mouth taunting. Her smile some
handsome forgery of myself.

Grateful, even now,
they cannot see the bald-wire
patois of my shamdom—

Makeshift, dreaming the warmth
spent in the muscle of the living,
the girl I grew inside my head dreaming

of a real girl, dreaming.
I wanted a pearled purse so I stole it.
I wanted a real friend so I let him. Let her.

Let him. Let him. Let him.

This beauty I am eager to hoard
comes slippery on ordinary days,

comes not at all, comes never.

Yet I am a pure shelled-thing. Glistening
manmade against the wall where one
then two fingers entered

the first time,
terror dazzling the uncertainty
of pleasure. Its God as real as girlhood.

Copyright © 2020 by Safiya Sinclair. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 4, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, Black History Month

Inheritance
~Camille Rankine

What have I

To say in my wrong tongue

Of what is gone   To know something is

Lost but what   You have forgotten what

You long forgot   If I am 

What survives   I am here but I am not

Much of anything at all   To be what’s left 

And all the rest scooped out 

And dropped into the sea   My flesh

Forming a knot on itself is a habit

Learned from whom   A mind reaching back

Into the dark a body releasing itself

Backward into space a faith

I have no prayer in which to keep

Am I home or merely caught

Between two unmarked graves

I’m saying where we live

It’s a mistake   A compromise 

I’m made to make   

I’m told come willingly 

Halfway across a bridge to where

I’m halfway human   Or else 

A door bricked over 

Behind which all I am   

To be shadow cast by shadows cast

By no one’s hand   And now

Whose fault am I   It’s said 

I stand against the grain

Of natural law   A being in chaos

In argument with itself   What would it be

To be simply   I am here but what of me 

That’s gone stays gone

Copyright © 2019 by Camille Rankine. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 5, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, Black History Month Edition

Bird
 ~Niki Herd

Yesterday, at Shepherd and Gray, the parking lot was
filled with birds, black birds, actually grackles. It was a grackle
lot; instead of a bumper on a car, there were ten grackles, instead
of a sunroof, fifty grackles sat high, their bodies shimmers
under cheap strip mall lights as shoppers delayed their spending
to pull out phones and take shots, such spectators we were,
like that summer in July, when I was left again
to wonder who was the child and who the adult,
that Sunday evening that hung in the air like bug spray
when my father, the one who fed me and gave me his last name,
stood two stories on our family porch, every neighbor,
in all manner of dress, drawn from their homes, in the street watching.
Let me tell you how he spread his arms wide, like the man
he was before Vietnam, or before the schizophrenia.
Let me tell you how a child learns the alphabet by counting,
how she learns only 2 letters separate the words hero and heroin,
how he stood high on the ledge of a porch the child never much
liked because there was a crack in its wooden center as if the world
was waiting to open its jaws to swallow her body whole.
Let me tell you how that July evening didn’t hold death,
but instead was the preface to death. The point being he jumped.
Some will say there are worse songs to sing, others might believe it
a tragedy, but who are we to question the Gods when a man
unconcerned with the inconvenience of his presence shows up
in a parking lot winged as an army of himself? Eventually, lights
went dark in the shops and each watcher retraced their steps back
           home
to find their families, to rejoice over food, to laugh and settle the night;
and the birds, steadfast they stood, not quite ready for flight—


Copyright © 2020 by Niki Herd. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 20, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

OOPS... got caught in drafts... Black History Month POETRY

My Mother and Lucille Clifton Have Tea
 ~Parneshia Jones

When I get to where I’m going
I want the death of my children explained to me.
                                             —Lucille Clifton

They meet over tea and potato chips.
Brown and buttermilk women,
hipped and hardened,
legs uncrossed but proper
still in their smiles;
smiles that carry a sadness in faint creases.
A sadness they will never be without.

One asks the other,
“What do they call a woman who has lost a child?”

The other sighs between sips of lukewarm tea.
There is no name for us.

“No name? But there has to be a name for us.
We must have something to call ourselves.”

Surely, history by now and all the women
who carry their babies’ ghosts on their backs,
mothers who wake up screaming,
women wide awake in their nightmares,
mothers still expected to be mothers and human,
women who stand under hot showers weeping,
mothers who wish they could drown standing up,
women who can still smell them—hear them,
the scent and symphony of their children,
deep down in the good earth.

“Surely, history has not forgotten to name us?”

No woman wants to bear
whatever could be the name for this grief.
Even if she must bear the grief for all her days,
it would be far too painful to be called by that name.

“I’ve lost two, you know.”
Me too.
“I was angry at God, you know.”
Me too.
“I stopped praying but only for a little while,
and then I had no choice. I had to pray again.
I had to call out to something that was no longer there.
I had to believe God knew where it was.”

“I fear death no longer. It has taken everything.
But should I be? Should I be afraid of what death has taken?
That it took and left no name?”

The other who sighs between sips of lukewarm tea
leans over and kisses the cheek of the one still with questions.
She whispers…

No, you don’t have to be afraid.
Death is no more scary than the lives we have lived
without our babies, bound to this grief
with no name.

Copyright © 2019 Parneshia Jones. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 22, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, Black History Month Edition

Winter
~Constance Merritt

     after Lucie Brock-Broido

winter crossing
bleak annulled
dulcimer damaged
choir miraculous
air &
monstrous ravishing
animal fallen
calls nightsky
ghost spectacle
again lynch
light loved
flint bliss
starfish tissue
shrouds lukewarm
sheathes everything
fanatic vanishing


Copyright © 2020 by Constance Merritt. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 22, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.