Nightstick [A Mural for Michael Brown] • National Poetry Month

Nightstick [A Mural for Michael Brown]


There are gods
    of fertility,
corn, childbirth,

& police
    brutality—this last
is offered praise

& sacrifice
    near weekly
& still cannot

be sated—many-limbed,
    thin-skinned,
its colors are blue

& black, a cross-
    hatch of bruise
& bulletholes

punched out
    like my son’s 
three-hole notebooks—

pages torn
    like lungs, excised
or autopsied, splayed

open on a cold table
    or left in the street
for hours to stew.

A finger
    is a gun—
a wallet

is a gun, skin
    a shiny pistol,
a demon, a barrel

already ready—
    hands up
don’t shoot—

arms 
    not to bear
but bare. Don’t 

dare take
    a left
into the wrong

skin. Death
    is not dark
but a red siren

who will not blow
    breath into your open
mouth, arrested

like a heart. Because
    I can see
I believe in you, god

of police brutality—
    of corn liquor
& late fertility, of birth

pain & blood
    like the sun setting,
dispersing its giant

crowd of light.


by Kevin Young
courtesy poets.org

The Ghost • National Poetry Month

The Ghost

You must not think that what I have 
accomplished through you

could have been accomplished by any other means.

Each of us is to himself
indelible. I had to become that which could not

be, by time, from human memory, erased.

I had to burn my hungry, unappeasable
furious spirit

so inconsolably into you

you would without cease
write to bring me rest.

Bring us rest. Guilt is fecund. I knew

nothing I made
myself had enough steel in it to survive.

I tried: I made beautiful
paintings, beautiful poems. Fluff. Garbage.

The inextricability of love and hate?

If I had merely made you
love me you could not have saved me.

by Frank Bidart
courtesy poets.org

Wade in the Water • National Poetry Month

Tracy K. Smith reads her poem 'Wade in the Water'

martha promise receives leadbelly, 1935 • National Poetry Month

In anticipation of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize announcement, let's revisit last year's honoree.

martha promise receives leadbelly, 1935

when your man comes home from prison,

when he comes back like the wound

and you are the stitch,

when he comes back with pennies in his pocket

and prayer fresh on his lips,

you got to wash him down first.

you got to have the wildweed and treebark boiled

and calmed, waiting for his skin like a shining baptism

back into what he was before gun barrels and bars

chewed their claim in his hide and spit him

stumbling backwards into screaming sunlight.

you got to scrub loose the jailtime fingersmears

from ashy skin, lather down the cuffmarks

from ankle and wrist, rinse solitary’s stench loose

from his hair, scrape curse and confession

from the welted and the smooth,

the hard and the soft,

the furrowed and the lax.

you got to hold tight that shadrach’s face

between your palms, take crease and lid

and lip and brow and rinse slow with river water,

and when he opens his eyes

you tell him calm and sure

how a woman birthed him

back whole again.

by Tyehimba Jess

from leadbelly

courtesy Poetry Foundation

A Young Man • National Poetry Month

A Young Man

We stand together on our block, me and my son,
Neighbors saying our face is the same, but I know
He’s better than me: when other children move

Toward my daughter, he lurches like a brother
Meant to put them down. He is a bodyguard
On the playground. He won’t turn apart from her,

Empties any enemy, leaves them flimsy, me
Confounded. I never fought for so much—
I calmed my daughter when I could cradle

My daughter; my son swaggers about her. 
He won’t have to heal a girl he won’t let free. 
They are so small. And I, still, am a young man.

In him lives my black anger made red.
They play. He is not yet incarcerated.

by Jericho Brown
courtesy poets.org

The Armadillo • National Poetry Month

The Armadillo

for Robert Lowell

This is the time of year

when almost every night

the frail, illegal fire balloons appear.

Climbing the mountain height,

rising toward a saint

still honored in these parts,

the paper chambers flush and fill with light

that comes and goes, like hearts.

Once up against the sky it's hard

to tell them from the stars—

planets, that is—the tinted ones:

Venus going down, or Mars,

or the pale green one. With a wind,

they flare and falter, wobble and toss;

but if it's still they steer between

the kite sticks of the Southern Cross,

receding, dwindling, solemnly

and steadily forsaking us,

or, in the downdraft from a peak,

suddenly turning dangerous.

Last night another big one fell.

It splattered like an egg of fire

against the cliff behind the house.

The flame ran down. We saw the pair

of owls who nest there flying up

and up, their whirling black-and-white

stained bright pink underneath, until

they shrieked up out of sight.

The ancient owls' nest must have burned.

Hastily, all alone,

a glistening armadillo left the scene,

rose-flecked, head down, tail down,

and then a baby rabbit jumped out,

short-eared, to our surprise.

So soft!—a handful of intangible ash

with fixed, ignited eyes.

Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!

O falling fire and piercing cry 

and panic, and a weak mailed fist

clenched ignorant against the sky!

by Elizabeth Bishop
courtesy poets.org

In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport • National Poetry Month

In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport


Here, where the noises of the busy town,
   The ocean's plunge and roar can enter not,
We stand and gaze around with tearful awe,
   And muse upon the consecrated spot.

No signs of life are here: the very prayers
   Inscribed around are in a language dead;
The light of the "perpetual lamp" is spent
   That an undying radiance was to shed.

What prayers were in this temple offered up,
   Wrung from sad hearts that knew no joy on earth,
By these lone exiles of a thousand years,
   From the fair sunrise land that gave them birth!

How as we gaze, in this new world of light,
   Upon this relic of the days of old,
The present vanishes, and tropic bloom
   And Eastern towns and temples we behold.

Again we see the patriarch with his flocks,
   The purple seas, the hot blue sky o'erhead,
The slaves of Egypt,—omens, mysteries,—
   Dark fleeing hosts by flaming angels led.

A wondrous light upon a sky-kissed mount,
   A man who reads Jehovah's written law,
'Midst blinding glory and effulgence rare,
   Unto a people prone with reverent awe.

The pride of luxury's barbaric pomp,
   In the rich court of royal Solomon—
Alas! we wake: one scene alone remains,—
   The exiles by the streams of Babylon.

Our softened voices send us back again
   But mournful echoes through the empty hall:
Our footsteps have a strange unnatural sound,
   And with unwonted gentleness they fall.

The weary ones, the sad, the suffering,
   All found their comfort in the holy place,
And children's gladness and men's gratitude
   'Took voice and mingled in the chant of praise.

The funeral and the marriage, now, alas!
   We know not which is sadder to recall;
For youth and happiness have followed age,
   And green grass lieth gently over all.

Nathless the sacred shrine is holy yet,
   With its lone floors where reverent feet once trod.
Take off your shoes as by the burning bush,
   Before the mystery of death and God.


By Emma Lazarus
Courtesy Poetry Foundation