Let the World Be a Black Poem: Poetry at a Time of Protest
Danez Smith, Robin Coste Lewis, and More
“Warriors are poets and poems and all the loveliness here in the worlds,” wrote Amiri Baraka in his great poem, “Black Art,” published after the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, the country reeling in anguish and grief and fury. “Let the world be a Black Poem,” he wrote
And Let All Black People Speak This Poem
Silently
or LOUD
These emotions overran a pandemic lockdown this week, 55 years later, after a white Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin used his bodyweight as a weapon on the neck of an un-armed unresisting black man, George Floyd. Despite Floyd saying 16 times, “I can’t breathe,” Chauvin remained kneeling for almost nine minutes, ultimately killing Floyd.
Protests erupted in Minneapolis and grew to dozens of cities around the world last week, calling for justice, dignity and police reform. Whether you are at home or not, alone or not, click through below for some poems to keep you company and hold you close in this time.
–John Freeman
*
Morgan Parker
A Brief History of the Present
“On the phone I ask Jericho how the south is treating him. He says today he wasn’t shot to death, and we laugh. There’s no way a black woman killed herself, because everyone knows we can withstand inhuman amounts of pain.”
*
Robin Coste Lewis
What We Had
”Too much love not enough
To eat gravel and blood fires
A wide street two cemeteries
Where we played Hide and Seek
The cracked earth dead palm trees
Houses uninhabitable long before
They were burned being hungry
And not knowing it wasn’t normal”
*
Justin Phillip Reed
When I Made a Monster
”My monster had no first breath
and none after: I wanted it
too broke to be robbed
which seemed as much a myth
as my creating anything that they
would not eventually exploit.”
*
Jericho Brown
Correspondence
”I am writing to you from the other side
Of my body where I have never been
Shot and no one’s ever cut me.
I had to go back this far in order
To present myself as a whole being
You’d heed and believe in.”
*
Terrance Hayes
American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin
”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.”
*
Danez Smith
i’m sick of pretending to give a shit about what whypeepo think
”band-aids are the color of the ones who make the wound
& whats a band-aid to a bullet to the rent is sky high & we
gotta move?”
*
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Blues: Odysseus
”Centuries after that story was written,
in the land of Not Make Believe,
a crew of slave-ship sailors
threw one hundred and thirty-two
Africans into the Atlantic Ocean.”
_______________________________
Featured image: Untitled, Alabama, 1956 © The Gordon Parks Foundation
John Freeman
John Freeman is the editor of Freeman’s, a literary annual of new writing, and executive editor of Literary Hub. His books include How to Read a Novelist and Dictionary of the Undoing, as well as a trilogy of anthologies about inequality, including Tales of Two Americas, about inequity in the US at large, and Tales of Two Planets, which features storytellers from around the globe on the climate crisis. Maps, his debut collection of poems, was published in 2017, followed by The Park in 2020. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Times. He is the former editor of Granta and teaches writing at NYU.
