Trojan Poetry 112: "Obligations 1" by Layli Long Soldier

Trojan Poetry 111: "Echo" by Carol Ann Duffy

Echo
By Carol Ann Duffy

I think I was searching for treasures or stones
in the clearest of pools
when your face…

when your face,
like the moon in a well
where I might wish…

might well wish
for the iced fire of your kiss;
only on water my lips, where your face…

where your face was reflected, lovely,
not really there when I turned
to look behind at the emptying air…

the emptying air.

Trojan Poetry 108: "The Sea Monkeys" by Barbara J. Orton

The Sea Monkeys
by Barbara J. Orton

At first my mother balked I already had
Two overfed gerbils, a tomcat I tried to dress
In baby clothes, guppies that kissed my fingers
And ate their young: what more
dominion could a girl ask for?
I pleaded, offered pocket money,
and at last I had it: a box
with a sheaf of directions, and three packets -
eggs, food, and salt broth.

As soon as they hatched, I knew
I’d been had. These were brine shrimp,
the kind that came with my microscope kit:
a quarter inch long, white,
brainless, spineless. All they did was twitch.

The next day I fed them to the guppies.
For years, I made do with dolls
and tractable playmates. It’s just as well.
I don’t like to think what would have happened
If, at that age, I’d had my heart’s desire:
a colony of tiny human slaves.

Trojan Poetry 110: Danez Smith and Natasha Tretheway

alternate names for black boys

by Danez Smith

1.   smoke above the burning bush

2.   archnemesis of summer night

3.   first son of soil

4.   coal awaiting spark & wind

5.   guilty until proven dead

6.   oil heavy starlight

7.   monster until proven ghost

8.   gone

9.   phoenix who forgets to un-ash

10. going, going, gone

11. gods of shovels & black veils

12. what once passed for kindling

13. fireworks at dawn

14. brilliant, shadow hued coral

15. (I thought to leave this blank

       but who am I to name us nothing?)

16. prayer who learned to bite & sprint

17. a mother’s joy & clutched breath

Source: Poetry (March 2014)

Enlightenment

By Natasha Trethewey

In the portrait of Jefferson that hangs

        at Monticello, he is rendered two-toned:

his forehead white with illumination —

a lit bulb — the rest of his face in shadow,

        darkened as if the artist meant to contrast

his bright knowledge, its dark subtext.

By 1805, when Jefferson sat for the portrait,

        he was already linked to an affair

with his slave. Against a backdrop, blue

and ethereal, a wash of paint that seems

        to hold him in relief, Jefferson gazes out

across the centuries, his lips fixed as if

he's just uttered some final word.

        The first time I saw the painting, I listened

as my father explained the contradictions:

how Jefferson hated slavery, though — out

        of necessity, my father said — had to own

slaves; that his moral philosophy meant

he could not have fathered those children:

        would have been impossible, my father said.

For years we debated the distance between

word and deed. I'd follow my father from book

        to book, gathering citations, listening

as he named — like a field guide to Virginia —

each flower and tree and bird as if to prove

        a man's pursuit of knowledge is greater

than his shortcomings, the limits of his vision.

I did not know then the subtext

        of our story, that my father could imagine

Jefferson's words made flesh in my flesh —

the improvement of the blacks in body

        and mind, in the first instance of their mixture

with the whites — or that my father could believe

he'd made me better. When I think of this now,

        I see how the past holds us captive,

its beautiful ruin etched on the mind's eye:

my young father, a rough outline of the old man

        he's become, needing to show me

the better measure of his heart, an equation

writ large at Monticello. That was years ago.

        Now, we take in how much has changed:

talk of Sally Hemings, someone asking,

How white was she? — parsing the fractions

        as if to name what made her worthy

of Jefferson's attentions: a near-white,

quadroon mistress, not a plain black slave.

        Imagine stepping back into the past,

our guide tells us then — and I can't resist

whispering to my father: This is where

        we split up. I'll head around to the back.

When he laughs, I know he's grateful

I've made a joke of it, this history

        that links us — white father, black daughter —

even as it renders us other to each other.

Natasha Trethewey, "Enlightenment" from Thrall. Copyright © 2012 by Natasha Trethewey.  Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Trojan Poetry 109: "Spring Comes to Chicago" by Campbell McGrath

Spring Comes to Chicago

by Campbell McGrath

All through those final, fitful weeks we walked off the restlessness of our daily

expectancy on the avenues of sun-hunger and recalcitrant slush.

When would that big fat beautiful baby

Blue first day of spring arrive?

So we strolled the backstreets and boulevards to consider the clouds and drink

some decaf and escape the press of solicitous voices, gingerly, leaving feathers

unruffled, like that first, fearless pair of mallards coasting the lake’s archipelagoes

of melting ice. We walked to the movies, again and again - Eddie Murphy at the

Biograph, Orson Welles amid the Moorish splendor of the Music Box - varying

our route until we knew every block in the neighborhood, every greystone and

three-flat, every Sensei bar and Michoaqueno flower stall.

We walked to Ho Wah Garden and the Ostoneria and over to Becky’s for deep-

dish pizza;

to Manny’s for waffles on mornings of aluminum rain;

the German butcher for bratwurst, the Greek bakery for elephant ears, the 7-Eleven

for cocktail onions to satisfy Elizabeth’s idiosyncratic cravings.

We walked until our fears resurfaced and then ate out fears.

We walked ourselves right out of winter into precincts we knew and those we

didn’t and some the city kept as private enclaves for itself, a certain statue, a

street of saris, an oasis of cobbled lanes amid the welter of industry where

suddenly the forsythia is in lightning-fierce flower, sudden as lilac, as bells, as

thunder rolling in from the plains, sky a bruised melon spawning ocean-green

hailstones to carry our rusted storm gutters away in an avalanche of kerneled ice

plastered with bankrolls of last year’s leaves.

Behold the daffodil, behold the crocus!

Behold the awakened, the reborn, the already onrushing furious and blooming;

violets overgrown in the lawn gone back to prairie,

some trumpet-flowered vine exuding sweet ichor upon the vacant house across

the street,

dandelions blown to seed

and the ancient Japanese widows who stoop to gather their vinegar-bitter stems.

That final morning we clear the cobwebs and crack the storm windows and let the

breeze take shelter in our closets and to bask all day in its muddy immutable

odor. Elizabeth naps in a chair by the window, attuned to the ring of a distant

carrillon, matins and lauds, while down the block an unnumbered hoard of

rollerblades and bicycles propel their messengers like locusts assembled at the toll

of some physiological clock, the ancient correlation of sap and sunlight,

equinoctial sugar and blood. The big elm has begun its slow adumbration of

fluted leaflets and buds on branch tips, percussive nubs and fine-veined tympani,

a many-fingered symphony tuning up.

Vespers: swallows and doves;

Elizabeth takes a final stitch in her tiny welcome blanket; yawns; done.

Bodies and hours, bodies and hours.

At midnight I close the book on final grades to find my desk alive with a host of

translucent, freshly-fledged spiders, a microscopic multitude borne in on the

breeze to take up residence among the computer keys, a vision that bears me

down the umbilicus of dreams toward a dim, persistent, unreasoning rhythm, a

music long promised, a visitation at last given up and unlooked for, ghostly silk

loomed from winter’s cocoon or the opening of one wind-shaken blossom -

Behold the sleepers! When they wake everything,

o everything

shall be transformed.