ode to my blackness
by Evie Shockley
you are my shelter from the storm
and the storm
my anchor
and the troubled sea
* * *
nights casts you warm and glittering
upon my shoulders some would
say you give off no heat some folks
can’t see beyond the closest star
* * *
you are the tunnel john henry died
to carve
i see the light
at the end of you the beginning
* * *
i dig down deep and there you are are at the root of my blues
you’re all thick and dark, enveloping the root of my blues
seem like it’s so hard to let you go when i got nothing to lose
* * *
without you, I would be just
a self of my former shadow
Evie Shockley
the new black, 2011, Wesleyan University Press.
MoSt Poetry Center will post a poem a day by a Black poet through the month of June.