Sunday 11 September 2016

What Black Poets Know By Heart

A 20-year-old US black poet has won the prestigious ‘Most Promising Young Poet Award’ from the Academy of American Poets. Donte-Collins_thumb17

Donte Collins scooped the prize for a poem dashed off in only 15 minutes and which was triggered by yet another shooting of a fellow black man by a white police officer.

Collins is a young man who may well be suffused by an uncomprehending, unrelenting rage.

After all, he could demand, as he was born in Chicago why were he and a brother summarily despatched to be adopted by a total stranger in Minneapolis-St Paul, Minnesota when he was aged only two? Didn’t they have a say in the arrangement? Why weren’t they allowed to be raised and loved by their natural mother – like other kids?

“My childhood was filled with both beauty and struggle … I was so angry. I didn’t understand what adoption meant. I had so much grief,” he says. It was only later that he began to understand that he could best express himself by using words instead of fists.

Amy-King_thumb13Below I repost Donte’s poem, what the dead know by heart along with Perspective by Amy King, who was co-winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize.

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what the dead know by heart

by Donte Collins

 

lately, when asked how are you, i

respond with a name no longer living

Rekia, Jamar, Sandra

i am alive by luck at this point. i wonder

often:  if the gun that will unmake me

is yet made, what white birth

will bury me, how many bullets, like a

flock of blue jays, will come carry my black

to its final bed, which photo will be used

to water down my blood. today i did

not die and there is no god or law to

thank. the bullet missed my head

and landed in another. today, i passed

a mirror and did not see a body, instead

a suggestion, a debate, a blank

post-it note there looking back. i

haven’t enough room to both rage and

weep. i go to cry and each tear turns

to steam. I say I matter and a ghost

white hand appears over my mouth.

-----------------

Perspective

by Amy King

When I see the two cops laughing

after one of them gets shot

because this is TV and one says

while putting pressure on the wound,

Haha, you're going to be fine,

and the other says, I know, haha!,

as the ambulance arrives—

I know the men are white.

I think of a clip from the hours

of amateur footage I've seen

when another man at an intersection

gets shot, falls, and bleeds from a hole

the viewer knows exists only by the way

the dark red pools by the standing cop's feet,

gun now holstered, who

yells the audience back to the sidewalk.

I know which one is dying

while black and which one stands by white.

I think this morning about the student

in my class who wrote a free write line

on the video I played

that showed a man pouring water

on his own chest, "...the homoerotic

scene against a white sky" with no other men

present. Who gets to see and who follows

what script? I ask my students.

Whose lines are these and by what hand

are they written?

© Natalie Wood (11 September 2016)

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