Only together holding their hands in silence can I see what a field has done to my mother, aunts and uncles.
The land around my grandmother's old tin roof has changed, I doubt she'd recognize it from above. How many blackbirds does it take to lift a house? I'll bring my living, you wake your dead.
We have nowhere to go, but we're leaving anyhow, by many ways. When they ask why you want to fly, Blackbird? Say
I want to leave the south because it killed the first man I loved and so much more killing. Say my son's name,
his death was the first thing to break me in and fly me through town.
If grief has a body it wears his Dodgers cap and still walks to the corner store to buy lottery tickets and Budweiser 40s.
I don't like what I have to be here to be.
All the blackbirds with nowhere to go keep leaving.
"Playwright and poet Daniel David Moses, a groundbreaking voice for Indigenous writers in Canada, has died...He published his first poem in 1974 and would go on to publish four collections throughout his career: Delicate Bodies, The White Line, Sixteen Jesuses and A Small Essay on the Largeness of Light and Other Poems."
Resources for Supporting and Uplifting the Black Community
Black Visions Collective: This social justice organization wants to focus on "work in healing and transformative justice principles, intentionally develop our organization's core 'DNA' to ensure sustainability, and develop Minnesota’s emerging black leadership to lead powerful campaigns."
Buy Books Online: Black-owned book stores across the country are open and ready to accept online orders. Start your search here.
Communities United Against Police Brutality: "This Twin Cities-based organization confronts police brutality by providing those in need with services, including but not limited to crisis hotlines and legal, medical, and psychological referrals."
Poetry Daily stands with the Black community. We oppose racism, oppression, and police brutality. We will continue to amplify diverse voices in the poetry world. Black Lives Matter.
"I thought about the future—and the shores my daughter would stand on—every time we played in water. Play with a young child is always about the objects themselves, but at the same time always seems somehow allegorical. A story unfolds. Ideas about the world are exposed: Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub…."
