American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin
From Terrance Hayes's Latest Poetry Collection
Our sermon today concerns the dialectic
Blessings in transgression & transcendence.
We’re on the middle floor where the darkness
We bury is equal to the lightness we intend.
We stand in the valley & go to our knees
On the mountain. One rope pulls a body down
And into earth, the other pulls up & after stars.
To be divided is to be multiplied. Let us
Ponder how it is that you & I have remained
Alive. Mississippi & all the seas bound to sky by rain,
The root & reach of all the trees. When the wound
Is deep, the healing is heroic. Suffering and
Ascendance require the same work. Our sermon
Today sets the beauty of sin against the purity of dirt.
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From American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. Used with permission of Penguin Books. Copyright © 2018 by Terrance Hayes.
Terrance Hayes
Terrance Hayes is the author of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, winner of the 2019 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award. His other poetry collections are So to Speak, How to Be Drawn, Wind in a Box, Hip Logic, and Muscular Music. He is also the author of To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight, winner of the 2019 Poetry Foundation Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. His honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship. Hayes lives in New York City, where he is a professor of creative writing at New York University
