A Palestinian Might Say

by Naomi Shihab Nye

What?
You don’t feel at home in your country,
almost overnight?
All the simple things
you cared about,
maybe took for granted. . .
you feel
insulted, invisible?
Almost as if you’re not there?
But you’re there.
Where before you mingled freely. . .
appreciated people who weren’t
just like you. . .
divisions grow stronger.
That’s what “chosen” and “unchosen” will do.
(Just keep your eyes on your houses and gardens.
Keep your eyes on that tree in bloom.)
Yes, a wall. Ours came later but. . .
who talks about how sad the land looks,
marked by a massive wall?
That’s not a normal shadow.
It’s something else looming over your lives.

from THE TINY JOURNALIST, 2019, BOA Editions

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

Guts, an excerpt

by Jane Wong

I enter a room.
A cat vomits as if to say

welcome home. Scattered
bones on the floor,

tiles of fur and fever:
welcome. Outside, the parks

are rinsed clean. Grass sprays
across my window.

This clean violence
for the Green and Livid.

·

Nothing I say leaves
this room. Not a foot,

not a single verb.
This room is meant

to be a cage to swing
sweetly in. Arm in

arm, slow scythe of
each doorway expanding

with each breath I hold in
until I can’t.

Remember, what you can’t
see can hurt you.

I will stay here,
getting fat in the eyes.

From OVERPOUR, published by Action Books. Copyright © 2016, Jane Wong.

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

My California

by Lee Herrick

Here, an olive votive keeps the sunset lit,
the Korean twenty-somethings talk about hyphens,

graduate school and good pot. A group of four at a window
table in Carpinteria discuss the quality of wines in Napa Valley versus Lodi.

Here, in my California, the streets remember the Chicano
poet whose songs still bank off Fresno’s beer soaked gutters

And almond trees in partial blossom. Here, in my California
we fish out long noodles from the pho with such accuracy

you’d know we’d done this before. In Fresno, the bullets
tire of themselves and begin to pray five times a day.

In Fresno, we hope for less of the police state and more of a state of grace.
In my California, you can watch the sun go down

like in your California, on the ledge of the pregnant
twenty-second century, the one with a bounty of peaches and grapes,

red onions and the good salsa, wine and chapchae.
Here, in my California, paperbacks are free,

farmer’s markets are twenty four hours a day and
always packed, the trees and water have no nails in them,

the priests eat well, the homeless eat well.
Here, in my California, everywhere is Chinatown,

everywhere is K-Town, everywhere is Armeniatown,
everywhere a Little Italy. Less confederacy.

No internment in the Valley.
Better history texts for the juniors.

In my California, free sounds and free touch.
     Free questions, free answers.
Free songs from parents and poets, those hopeful bodies of light.

From GARDENING SECRETS OF THE DEAD. Copyright © 2012 by Lee Herrick, published by WordTech Communications LLC.

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

When Night Fills With Premature Exits

by Enzo Silon Surin

Is there a place where black men can go
to be beautiful? Is there light there? Touch?

Is there comfort or room to raise their black
sons as anything other than a future asterisk,

at risk to be asteroid or rogue planet but not
comet—to be studded with awe and clamor

and admired for radial trajectories across
a dark sky made of asphalt and moonshine

to be celebs and deemed a magnificent sight?

Copyright © 2020 by Enzo Silon Surin. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 10, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.

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

Learning Arabic

by Ruth Awad

Suspended in
the Téléphérique
above Harissa,
I see our salt-white
lady reach for Beirut.
Language is both
the cedar shade
and mountain road,
the bay licking the heels
of Jounieh. My auntie
teaches me the Arabic
word for cat. My
American tongue
and bare legs
say I’m Lebanese
only in blood.
She wants me
to learn.
If not for cables,
we would drop
to our deaths.
If not for our blood,
we’d be untethered.
What saves us
is the one
small thing:
a cable,
a call to prayer,
a new word
strung like a pearl
in the mouth
of a girl.

Source: https://thespectacle.wustl.edu/?p=1370

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