Award-winning poet Danez Smith, whose work is mined from the place where blackness, queerness and a solid feminist politic all meet, is one of poetry’s great black hopes – one of its great hopes, period. His collection [insert] Boy (YesYes Books, 2014) put him on the map but he’s continued honing and refining his eye and ear. He recently dropped the poem, “It Doesn’t Feel Like a Time to Write,” which captures both an age-old dilemma for black writers – how inept to the task of fighting for black life writing can seem when bodies are literally falling – while underscoring just how important it is that wordsmiths take pen in hand and document the world in which they and we live.
The poem begins:
being black feels like a lot right now.
they shot a man then they shot
the people mourning the man.
they shot a man while he was
- handcuffed
- walking away
- already dead
It then takes the reader through an intimate confession that delicately but powerfully unfolds into a scathing critique of white supremacy and how it manifests in relationship to blackness.
i got a fear of being black in public
& white folks are raised to fear of me.
niggagoraphobia has taken over the nation
& i’ve never been more afraid
of a white man’s temper.
in my dreams all the black folks
turn to ants & America is a toddler
stomping us out – she’s so damn scared
& we can’t get away.
Read the whole poem here.
And watch Smith read his poem “Twerking as a Radical Form of Healing” below.
Top image courtesy Yes Yes Books.
