When Night Fills With Premature Exits

by Enzo Silon Surin

Is there a place where black men can go
to be beautiful? Is there light there? Touch?

Is there comfort or room to raise their black
sons as anything other than a future asterisk,

at risk to be asteroid or rogue planet but not
comet—to be studded with awe and clamor

and admired for radial trajectories across
a dark sky made of asphalt and moonshine

to be celebs and deemed a magnificent sight?

Copyright © 2020 by Enzo Silon Surin. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 10, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.

Most Poetry will post a poem by a poet of color, selected by our members, each day through the month of July.

Learning Arabic

by Ruth Awad

Suspended in
the Téléphérique
above Harissa,
I see our salt-white
lady reach for Beirut.
Language is both
the cedar shade
and mountain road,
the bay licking the heels
of Jounieh. My auntie
teaches me the Arabic
word for cat. My
American tongue
and bare legs
say I’m Lebanese
only in blood.
She wants me
to learn.
If not for cables,
we would drop
to our deaths.
If not for our blood,
we’d be untethered.
What saves us
is the one
small thing:
a cable,
a call to prayer,
a new word
strung like a pearl
in the mouth
of a girl.

Source: https://thespectacle.wustl.edu/?p=1370

Most Poetry will post a poem by a poet of color, selected by our members, each day through the month of July.

The Good Life

by Tracy K. Smith

When some people talk about money
They speak as if it were a mysterious lover
Who went out to buy milk and never
Came back, and it makes me nostalgic
For the years I lived on coffee and bread,
Hungry all the time, walking to work on payday
Like a woman journeying for water
From a village without a well, then living
One or two nights like everyone else
On roast chicken and red wine.

Poem copyright ©2011 by Tracy K. Smith from her book of poems, LIFE ON MARS, Graywolf Press, 2011.

Most Poetry will post a poem by a poet of color, selected by our members, each day through the month of July.

A Small Needful Fact

by Ross Gay

Is that Eric Garner worked
for some time for the Parks and Rec.
Horticultural Department, which means,
perhaps, that with his very large hands,
perhaps, in all likelihood,
he put gently into the earth
some plants which, most likely,
some of them, in all likelihood,
continue to grow, continue
to do what such plants do, like house
and feed small and necessary creatures,
like being pleasant to touch and smell,
like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe.

Yesterday was the 6th anniversary of Eric Garner’s death. Copyright © 2015 by Ross Gay. Reprinted from Split This Rock’s The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database and poets.org

Most Poetry will post a poem by a poet of color, selected by our members, each day through the month of July.