Not Poetry Thursday, surviving among the flames

 In the Middle of the Burning
~Canisia Lubrin

notice now pictures of awful things on top our head

the freight that barricades this view, how enough

how the law batter down the dogged tide we make

the world shoring its dark scars between seasons

as though to hold it together only by a flame

is here a voice to please enough the blunt

borderlessness of this grief turning our heads to rubble

the lunacy of nothing so limning as death in the streets

in these vibrating hours where the corners talk back

need I simply run my tongue along the granite sky and live

to know how lost the millionth life somewhere today
the swift shape of roads new names combust, the sum
of anthems flooding the world with the eye’s sudden and narrow
saltwater and streets ziplined with screams at the pitch of cooking pots
then tear gas, then pepper spray, then militarized lies unzipping
body bags, oh, our many many there, our alive and just born,
and that is how to say let’s fuck it up, we the beat and we the loud
tuning forks and the help arriving empty-handed
propping the hot news of new times on our head

days like these pleat whatever the hollow year must offer

between the not-yet-dead and those just waking up

it will not be the vanished thing that we remember

it will be what we exchanged close to midnight

like smugglers high-wiring the city, hoarding the thoughts

of ours we interrupted midway to discovering the velocity

of the burning world below

of our language in the lateness of our stuck and reckless love

where the forces who claim they love us
level our lives to crust—the centuries-wide dance
of swapped shackles for knees
their batons and miscellany
thrown at our whole lives demanding our mothers
raise from their separate rooms, separate graves, today
to save who and me? I open the book to a naked page
where nothing clatter my heart, what head
what teeth cling to broadside, roll alias after
alias with a pen at their dull tribunes and shrines
imagine our heirlooms of shot nerves make a life
given to placards and synergies and elegies, but more

last things: where letters here where snow in May

where the millennium unstitches the quartered earth

in June, how many today to the viral fire

the frosted rich and their forts, but not

the fulsome rage of my people unpeaced

mute boots with somber looks appear

a fearsome autumn ending spring, though we still hear

I dare not sing

another song to dig a hole this time for the lineages
of magnolias where the offspring bring a hand to cover
our mouth, our heaping lives, who sit who burn who drop
three feet to the tar, who eat and demolish the thing
that takes our head, the thing that is no more
the place that never was except a burning learned

just once and not again when the darker working’s race

Copyright © 2020 by Canisia Lubrin. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 3, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, owning our past and meaning your words

 You Still Dream

~Nikki Grimes

Here, poem meets prayer.

We are exceedingly comfortable

with posturing and self-defense

that masquerade as apology.

But what’s needed in this moment

is unmixed confession

of our nation’s sin,

deep and indefensible.

“Now I lay me down to sleep”

must make way for

something more muscular:

sack cloth and ashes,

prayer and fasting,

naked prostration.

Daniel understood

radical repentance begins

with this unvarnished profession:

You are righteous,

and we are not.

Please heal our nation.

Cleanse our stubborn hearts.

Show each of us what part to play.

Broken as Judah and Jerusalem,

we cry and come bending our will

toward the good

you dream for us still,

no matter our sin,

no matter what skin

we’re in.

Copyright © 2020 by Nikki Grimes. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 7, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, in honor of some of my AUG bday faves, HOPE

Hope.

~Alice Dunbar-Nelson

Wild seas of tossing, writhing waves,

A wreck half-sinking in the tortuous gloom;

One man clings desperately, while Boreas raves,

     And helps to blot the rays of moon and star,

     Then comes a sudden flash of light, which gleams on shores afar.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on July 19, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday

Contemplating Extinction as Theme in Basquiat’s “Pez Dispenser, 1984”

~Kristina Kay Robinson

for Malcolm Latiff Shabazz

yellow roses in my mother’s room   mean

I’m sorry   sadness comes in       generations

inheritance           split   flayed    displayed

better than all the others

crown                                        weight

the undue burden of the truly exceptional

most special of your kind, a kind of fire

persisting unafraid      saffron bloom

to remind us of fragility   or beauty       or revolution

to ponder darkly              in the bright

the fate of young kings

the crimes for which          there are no apologies.

Copyright © 2020 by Kristina Kay Robinson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 23, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.

Not Poetry Thursday, on memory and trauma

We Drink at the Attenuation Well

~Porsha Olayiwola

Motivated forgetting is a psychological defense mechanism whereby people cope with threatening and unwanted memories by suppressing them from consciousness.

            —Amy N. Dalton and Li Huang

              in Badagry there is a hung-

              ry well of water and memory

 

                                                         loss. in Badagry there was a well 

                                                         of people lost across a haven 

 

of water. in Badagry there was

a port overwhelmed in un-return. 

 

                                         to omit within the mind is to ebb

                                         heavenward. memory is a wealth 

 

                                                                 choking the brain in un-respons-

                                                                 ibility. violence in the mind and 

 

                                         the mind forgets in order to remember

                                         the self before the violence begot. 

in Badagry trauma washes ungod-

ly memory heavenward. in Bad-

 

                                       agry there is an attenuation well 

                                       meant to wish away a passage, 

 

                                                                      meant to unhaven a people.

                                                                      violence is underwhelming

 

                                       in return. what the body eats, 

                                       the mind waters. responsible 

 

is the memory for un-remittal. 

royal is the body for return. god is

 

                                                 the mind for wafting. forgetting 

                                                 is a port homeward. in Bad- 

 

                                                            agry hungry memory grows angry.

                                                            in Badagry the memories un- 

 

                 choke. trauma un-eats the royal. 

                 in Badagry there is a heaven 

 

                                                               of people responsible for the birth- 

                                                               right of remembering, for the well 

 

                                              of us across a haven of water

                                              overwhelmed in un-return.

Copyright © 2020 by Porsha Olayiwola. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 17, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, late but timely

For Black Children at the End of the World—and the Beginning

~Roger Reeves

You are in the black car burning beneath the highway

And rising above it—not as smoke

But what causes it to rise. Hey, Black Child,

You are the fire at the end of your elders’

Weeping, fire against the blur of horse, hoof,

Stick, stone, several plagues including time.

Chrysalis hanging on the bough of this night

And the burning world: Burn, Baby, burn.

Anvil and iron be thy name, yea though ye may

Walk among the harnessed heat and huntsmen

Who bear their masters’ hunger for paradise

In your rabbit-death, in the beheading of your ghost.

You are the healing snake in the heather

Bursting forth from your humps of sleep.

In the morning, your tongue moves along the earth

Naming hawk sky; rabbit run; your tongue,

Poison to the filthy democracy, to the gold-

Domed capitols where the ‘Guard in their grub-

Worm-colored uniforms cling to the blades of grass—

Worm on the leaf, worm in the dust, worm,

Worm made of rust: sing it with me,

Dragon of Insurmountable Beauty.

Black Child, laugh at the men with their hoofs

and borrowed muscle, their long and short guns,

The worm of their faces, their casket ass-

Embling of the afternoon, leftover leaves

From last year’s autumn scraping across their boots;

Laugh, laugh at their assassins on the roofs

(For the time of the assassin is also the time of hysterical laughter).

Black Child, you are the walking-on-of-water

Without the need of an approving master.

You are in a beautiful language.

You are what lies beyond this kingdom

And the next and the next and fire. Fire, Black Child.

Copyright © 2020 by Roger Reeves. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 16, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.