poem-a-day
Answers
Answers
They ask what I believe in— Sour milk: the curdle & butter of it Baby’s breath ragged with phlegm The green sheen clinging to her skin like algae The bone & teeth of us mossy and alive with DNA But what’s your religion, they’re after— What gods do you pray to? The frilly curtains of her laughter remodeling alla my pain Oh, how she adorns this house of mine So god’s a woman? (hands on they hips) How water ain’t a woman the way she make your thirst her temperamental breasts & everywhere everything everyone everywhichway—water Well, who your altars honor? The ghosts that inhabit us & all the evidence of them: double vision—floaters flecking our periphery when we look away from the light—all the mouths at the bottom of our stomach— Ever wonder why we eat two plates & still hungry? Or how our anger multiplies in seconds like a kitchen of negro roaches? Yes, even the roaches have melanin black/brown with the spirits of wayward witches I burn candles & pour brown liquor out for my bitches & they glorious golden auras To what churches do you tithe? Our Lady of Ladled Magnificence God of Ghetto Grace Incorporated Our Mother Who Art in Harlem House of Regurgitated Resurrections Have you ever been possessed? We ain’t never not been owned not with all that restless bone sediment at the bottom of the Atlantic wonder why we frantic with personalities How we sing with three throats bending notes weeping willow What are trees if not spirits weeping & dancing simultaneous? How we dipped our nooses in gold & hung crosses from them & wore them like shiny portable altars How is there not a church in our chests? How our breasts leak gospel truth How our teeth ache with the blood of Jesus Who, then, is your muse? (pointing) ain’t she a muse amusing a maze amazing amazon of our dreams prisms that fracture into auras & auras that fragment dimensions Isn’t mourning a religion, then? Like how all these feelings grow muscles & flex & jerk inside of me Like how they can’t kill us even when they hands scream bloody murder Like how we show up wearing white just to spite them—spit at the pulpit of bullshit & Babylon How we eat bibles for breakfast Leviticus & grits Our souls sizzling in the skillet like gizzards What is the geography of your grief? Everywhere they are & ain’t painting the block milk white & sickly a tricky bluish tint (think: veins under skin) a sticky blues a blush blood—bluing the block black
Copyright © 2019 by t'ai freedom ford. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 22, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
Copyright © 2019 by t'ai freedom ford. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 22, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
TC Tolbert
Classic Books of American Poetry
This collection of books showcases the masterpieces of American poetry that have influenced—or promise to influence—generations of poets. Take a look.
The Year
What can be said in New Year rhymes,
That's not been said a thousand times?
The new years come, the old years go,
We know we dream, we dream we know.
We rise up laughing with the light,
We lie down weeping with the night.
We hug the world until it stings,
We curse it then and sigh for wings.
We live, we love, we woo, we wed,
We wreathe our brides, we sheet our dead.
We laugh, we weep, we hope, we fear,
And that's the burden of the year.
Mary Oliver
Kindness
Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever. Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive. Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say It is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.
The Snow Man
One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January sun; and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves, Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Poetic Forms
Refresh and expand your poetic vocabulary with this collection of poetic forms, complete with historical contexts, examples, and more. For more on poetic forms, browse our selection of terms from Edward Hirsch’s A Poet’s Glossary or check out our quick teaching guide on essential poetic terms.
Langston Hughes
Tracy K. Smith
A House Called Tomorrow
You are not fifteen, or twelve, or seventeen—
You are a hundred wild centuries
And fifteen, bringing with you
In every breath and in every step
Everyone who has come before you,
All the yous that you have been,
The mothers of your mother,
The fathers of your father.
If someone in your family tree was trouble,
A hundred were not:
The bad do not win—not finally,
No matter how loud they are.
We simply would not be here
If that were so.
You are made, fundamentally, from the good.
With this knowledge, you never march alone.
You are the breaking news of the century.
You are the good who has come forward
Through it all, even if so many days
Feel otherwise. But think:
When you as a child learned to speak,
It’s not that you didn’t know words—
It’s that, from the centuries, you knew so many,
And it’s hard to choose the words that will be your own.
From those centuries we human beings bring with us
The simple solutions and songs,
The river bridges and star charts and song harmonies
All in service to a simple idea:
That we can make a house called tomorrow.
What we bring, finally, into the new day, every day,
Is ourselves. And that’s all we need
To start. That’s everything we require to keep going.
Look back only for as long as you must,
Then go forward into the history you will make.
Be good, then better. Write books. Cure disease.
Make us proud. Make yourself proud.
And those who came before you? When you hear thunder,
Hear it as their applause.
Dorianne Laux
John Donne
Lesson Plans for Winter and the Holidays
Celebrate winter and the holiday season in the classroom with this selection of lesson plans featuring poems by Richard Blanco, Emily Dickinson, Naomi Shihab Nye, and more.
A Poet's Glossary
Read about poetic terms and forms from Edward Hirsch's A Poet's Glossary (Harcourt, 2014), a book ten years in the making that defines the art form of poetry.
