A City’s Death By Fire

by Derek Walcott

After that hot gospeller has levelled all but the churched sky,
I wrote the tale by tallow of a city’s death by fire;
Under a candle’s eye, that smoked in tears, I
Wanted to tell, in more than wax, of faiths that were snapped like wire.
All day I walked abroad among the rubbled tales,
Shocked at each wall that stood on the street like a liar;
Loud was the bird-rocked sky, and all the clouds were bales
Torn open by looting, and white, in spite of the fire.
By the smoking sea, where Christ walked, I asked, why
Should a man wax tears, when his wooden world fails?
In town, leaves were paper, but the hills were a flock of faiths;
To a boy who walked all day, each leaf was a green breath
Rebuilding a love I thought was dead as nails,
Blessing the death and the baptism by fire.

from Walcott’s COLLECTED POEMS, 1948-1984, Macmillan, 1986

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

Extraction, an excerpt

by Tanaya Winder

Can we un-suicide, un-pipeline,
un-disappear our dear ones? There is no word
for undo but many ways to say return.
We never get to go back to before
our fathers began evaporating
and our mothers started flooding themselves
into unglobable rivers because their mothers
were taken long ago. And, we are still searching
dragging rivers red until we find every body
that ever went missing.

For as long as I can remember, we’ve been stolen:
from reservation to industrial boarding schools
and today our girls, women, and two-spirit still go missing
and murdered. I could find no word for this.
But yáakwi is to sink or disappear. Where is it we fall?
When did we first start vanishing?

We sewed new memories into old scars, a recorded pain
so precise like threading a needle one can barely see through.
Sometimes I want to set this world on fire,
carry the scent of smoke wherever I go
so (should I go missing) you’ll know how to find me.
Is this why our mothers grew up to be keepers of the fire?
And our fathers so guilty they shovel ash into their mouths?
This is where my tongue stumbles over its colonized self.

Grandmother, when it comes to letting go
my hands have always failed me,
but my mouth wants to tell the story
about the songs you still sing softly ‘áa-qáa
because one day when we’re gone,
the only thing left to fill the space
our bodies leave will be silence.

From WORDS LIKE LOVE by Tanaya Winder. Copyright 2015 (West End Press New Series)

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

Como Tú / Like You / Like Me

by Richard Blanco

{for the D.A.C.A DREAMers and all our nation’s immigrants}

. . . my veins don’t end in me
but in the unanimous blood
of those who struggle for life . . .

. . . mis venas no terminan en mí
sino en la sange unánime
de los que luchan por la vida . . .

—Roque Dalton, Como tú

Como tú, I question history’s blur in my eyes
each time I face a mirror. Like a mirror, I gaze
into my palm a wrinkled map I still can’t read,
my lifeline an unnamed road I can’t find, can’t
trace back to the fork in my parents’ trek
that cradled me here. Como tú, I woke up to
this dream of a country I didn’t choose, that
didn’t choose me—trapped in the nightmare
of its hateful glares. Como tú, I’m also from
the lakes and farms, waterfalls and prairies
of another country I can’t fully claim either.
Como tú, I am either a mirage living among
these faces and streets that raised me here,
or I’m nothing, a memory forgotten by all
I was taken from and can’t return to again.

Like memory, at times I wish I could erase
the music of my name in Spanish, at times
I cherish it, and despise my other syllables
clashing in English. Como tú, I want to speak
of myself in two languages at once. Despite
my tongues, no word defines me. Like words,
I read my footprints like my past, erased by
waves of circumstance, my future uncertain
as wind. Like the wind, como tú, I carry songs,
howls, whispers, thunder’s growl. Like thunder,
I’m a foreign-borne cloud that’s drifted here,
I’m lightning, and the balm of rain. Como tú,
our blood rains for the dirty thirst of this land.
Like thirst, like hunger, we ache with the need
to save ourselves, and our country from itself.

Copyright © 2019 by Richard Blanco. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 9, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets, from HOW TO LOVE A COUNTRY (Beacon Press, 2019).

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

We Are Remarkably Loud Not Masked

by Juan Felipe Herrera

young Jesse Washington —
                                  even though you     on the wooden stick
cross of fire bitten charred cut & burned        5 minute jury
April 15, 1916    Waco, Texas shackled & dragged — lynched
                                                You live on

                                                                Trayvon Martin face down
red juice on the lawn clutching candy rushing home
the hoodie the hoodie the prowler shooter said
upside down shredded night

                                                                              because of you     you

we march touch hands lean back leap forth
against the melancholy face of tanks & militia    we move
                                                              walk become
we become           somehow

Eric Garner we scribble your name sip your breath    now
               our breath cannot be choked off our
skin cannot be flamed      totality
                                      cannot be cut off
each wrist
each bone
cannot be chained to the abyss
               gnashing levers & polished
                                   killer sheets of steel

we are remarkably loud not masked
                rough river colors that cannot be threaded back

hear us
Freddie Gray here                                         with us

                                          Jesse Washington Trayvon Martin
Michel Brown the Black Body holy
    Eric Garner  all breath Holy
we weep & sing
as we write
                             as we mobilize & march
                                  under the jubilant solar face

Juan Felipe Herrera, “We Are Remarkably Loud Not Masked” from Notes on the Assemblage (City Lights Books, 2015). Copyright © 2015 by Juan Felipe Herrera.

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

Another Heaven

by Mai Der Vang

I am but atoms
Of old passengers

Bereaved to my cloistered bones.

This rotation is my recipe,
The telling of every edition

As a landscape on slow windshields.
The body no longer

                                   Baskets fatigue,
No envelopes with oxygen left to cure.

When funeral recites
The supper gardens of my forefathers,
Cross-stitch from my mother kin,

                        Then I will come to you

Dressed in my armor of earth,
Ready as you chant my tale.

            When I reach the sloped halls
           And hammock sun,

I won’t tell why the split orchid
Falls behind. Instead,
                                  I tell why it arrives.

From Afterland by Mai Der Vang, Graywolf Press, ©2017

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