Who comforts you now that the wheel has broken?
No more princes for the poor. Loss whittling you thin.
Grief is the constant now, hope the last word spoken.
In a dance of two elegies, which circles the drain? A token
year with its daisies and carbines is where we begin.
Who comforts you now? That the wheel has broken
is Mechanics 101; to keep dreaming when the joke’s on
you? Well, crazier legends have been written.
Grief is the constant now; hope, the last word spoken
on a motel balcony, shouted in a hotel kitchen. No kin
can make this journey for you. The route’s locked in.
Who comforts you now that the wheel has broken
the bodies of its makers? Beyond the smoke and
ashes, what you hear rising is nothing but the wind.
Who comforts you? Now that the wheel has broken,
grief is the constant. Hope: the last word spoken.
Copyright © 2020 by Rita Dove. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 21, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.
Prisoners are we,
American citizens imprisoned
For daring in the name of Democracy
To protest against the continued denial
Of the right of self-government
To twenty millions of the American people.
We lie in a dungeon
Long ago abandoned and condemned,
Just as politically we are held
Imprisoned in a subjection
Abandoned and condemned
By every other nation of English speech and spirit.
Painfully raising my head,
I look down the long row
Of gray-blanketed heaps.
Under every heap a woman,
Weak, sick, but determined,
Twenty gray fortresses of determination.
This poem is in the public domain.
for my ancestor
in the Pennsylvania 25th Colored Infantry
aboard the Suwanee
First a penny-sized hole in the hull
then eager saltwater rushing over
us and clouds swirling and clotting
the moonlight—no time to stop and look upon it
as the hole becomes an iron mouth,
makes strange sounds, peels and tears
open iron as iron should not open—
muffled and heavy us becoming underwater
we confused the metal echo and thunder
as the same death knell from God’s mouth—
we been done floated all this way down
in dark blue used
uniforms, how far from slavers’ dried-out fields
in Virginia, Pennsylvania—wherever
we came from now we
barely and only
see and hear an ocean
whipped into storm
not horror, not glory, but storm
not fear, not power, but focus
on the work of breathing, living as the storm
rocks us and our insides upside down turns
hard tack into empty nausea—
so close to death I thought I saw the blaze-
sick fields of Berryville again, the curling fingers
of tobacco, hurt fruit and flower—
but no, but no.
I say no to death now. I’m nobody’s slave
now. I’m alive and not alone,
one of those who escaped and made myself
a soldier a weapon a stone in David’s sling
riding the air above the deep. I grow more dangerous
to those who want me. I ain’t going back
to anywhere I been before.
I grab a bucket. You grab a bucket. We the 25th
Pennsylvania Colored Infantry, newly formed
and too alive and close to free
to sink below this midnight water. 36 hours—chaos
shoveling-lifting-throwing ocean back into ocean
to reach land and war in the Carolinas.
I stole my body back from death and going down
more than once. I steal my breath
tonight and every night I will not drown.
Copyright © 2020 by Aaron Coleman. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 24, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.