Freedom in Ohio

by Jennifer Chang

I want a future
making hammocks
out of figs and accidents.
Or a future quieter
than snow. The leopards
stake out the backyard
and will flee at noon.
My terror is not secret,
but necessary,
as the wild must be,
as sandhill cranes must
thread the meadow
yet again. Thus, autumn
cautions the cold
and the wild never want
to be wild. So what
to do about the thrum
of my thinking, the dangerous
pawing at the door?
Yesterday has no harmony
with today. I bought
a wool blanket, now shredded
in the yard. I abided by
dwelling, thought nothing
of now. And now?
I’m leopard and crane,
all’s fled.

From SOME SAY THE LARK by Jennifer Chang. Alice James Books, 2017.

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

Excuse Me My Trespasses

by Chiyuma Elliot

Jimsoned, my words are; clovered, clustered.
Excuse my hair, my platform eyes.
I’m crowded by theorems
and connected investigations;
they clutter the chairs, they jimmy all the locks.
They return my kisses with such sobriety
that blue and slow are crowns, synonyms.
I might have waited elsewhere.
But looking is its own gym, its own pay-off,
and the distance seems articulate:
silver, chrome, the wind disarranging
leaves fields variousness of landscapes,
the James flowing south to weathers
and east into weathers.
I crow over the vastness,
and it returns such vastness.

Note: The “Jim Crow” is a poetic form invented by Purvis Cornish, and it requires repeating those two words in regular patterns. This poem also borrows words and phrases from Robert Hayden’s “[American Journal].”

“Excuse Me My Trespasses” was originally published online at the Daily Californian, February 7, 2019. https://www.dailycal.org/2019/02/07/excuse-me-my-trespasses/

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

A City’s Death By Fire

by Derek Walcott

After that hot gospeller has levelled all but the churched sky,
I wrote the tale by tallow of a city’s death by fire;
Under a candle’s eye, that smoked in tears, I
Wanted to tell, in more than wax, of faiths that were snapped like wire.
All day I walked abroad among the rubbled tales,
Shocked at each wall that stood on the street like a liar;
Loud was the bird-rocked sky, and all the clouds were bales
Torn open by looting, and white, in spite of the fire.
By the smoking sea, where Christ walked, I asked, why
Should a man wax tears, when his wooden world fails?
In town, leaves were paper, but the hills were a flock of faiths;
To a boy who walked all day, each leaf was a green breath
Rebuilding a love I thought was dead as nails,
Blessing the death and the baptism by fire.

from Walcott’s COLLECTED POEMS, 1948-1984, Macmillan, 1986

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

Extraction, an excerpt

by Tanaya Winder

Can we un-suicide, un-pipeline,
un-disappear our dear ones? There is no word
for undo but many ways to say return.
We never get to go back to before
our fathers began evaporating
and our mothers started flooding themselves
into unglobable rivers because their mothers
were taken long ago. And, we are still searching
dragging rivers red until we find every body
that ever went missing.

For as long as I can remember, we’ve been stolen:
from reservation to industrial boarding schools
and today our girls, women, and two-spirit still go missing
and murdered. I could find no word for this.
But yáakwi is to sink or disappear. Where is it we fall?
When did we first start vanishing?

We sewed new memories into old scars, a recorded pain
so precise like threading a needle one can barely see through.
Sometimes I want to set this world on fire,
carry the scent of smoke wherever I go
so (should I go missing) you’ll know how to find me.
Is this why our mothers grew up to be keepers of the fire?
And our fathers so guilty they shovel ash into their mouths?
This is where my tongue stumbles over its colonized self.

Grandmother, when it comes to letting go
my hands have always failed me,
but my mouth wants to tell the story
about the songs you still sing softly ‘áa-qáa
because one day when we’re gone,
the only thing left to fill the space
our bodies leave will be silence.

From WORDS LIKE LOVE by Tanaya Winder. Copyright 2015 (West End Press New Series)

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

Como Tú / Like You / Like Me

by Richard Blanco

{for the D.A.C.A DREAMers and all our nation’s immigrants}

. . . my veins don’t end in me
but in the unanimous blood
of those who struggle for life . . .

. . . mis venas no terminan en mí
sino en la sange unánime
de los que luchan por la vida . . .

—Roque Dalton, Como tú

Como tú, I question history’s blur in my eyes
each time I face a mirror. Like a mirror, I gaze
into my palm a wrinkled map I still can’t read,
my lifeline an unnamed road I can’t find, can’t
trace back to the fork in my parents’ trek
that cradled me here. Como tú, I woke up to
this dream of a country I didn’t choose, that
didn’t choose me—trapped in the nightmare
of its hateful glares. Como tú, I’m also from
the lakes and farms, waterfalls and prairies
of another country I can’t fully claim either.
Como tú, I am either a mirage living among
these faces and streets that raised me here,
or I’m nothing, a memory forgotten by all
I was taken from and can’t return to again.

Like memory, at times I wish I could erase
the music of my name in Spanish, at times
I cherish it, and despise my other syllables
clashing in English. Como tú, I want to speak
of myself in two languages at once. Despite
my tongues, no word defines me. Like words,
I read my footprints like my past, erased by
waves of circumstance, my future uncertain
as wind. Like the wind, como tú, I carry songs,
howls, whispers, thunder’s growl. Like thunder,
I’m a foreign-borne cloud that’s drifted here,
I’m lightning, and the balm of rain. Como tú,
our blood rains for the dirty thirst of this land.
Like thirst, like hunger, we ache with the need
to save ourselves, and our country from itself.

Copyright © 2019 by Richard Blanco. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 9, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets, from HOW TO LOVE A COUNTRY (Beacon Press, 2019).

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