Seer
Last night
you look
at me hard
then soft
like you see
something
old and sad
in me.
From Back of Mount Peace. Copyright © 2010 by Kwame Dawes. Used with the permission of Peepal Tree Press.
Poems
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The Glory Has Left the Temple
for Gabriel García Márquez
To tell it, I must call it a dream.
A dream on the Caribbean coast of Colombia
where a beautiful black man serves
thick omelets messy with onions and mushrooms
to an assortment of mavericks—dock workers,
professors, maids, three police officers,
five whores, and a clutch of lawyers—at midnight,
sopping up the curdling rum in their bellies
with thick chunks of white doughy bread.
2017
Dirt
I got one part of it. Sell them watermelons and get me another part. Get Bernice to sell that piano and I’ll have the third part.
—August Wilson
2017
A Way of Seeing
It all comes from this dark dirt,
memory as casual as a laborer.
Remembrances of ancestors
kept in trinkets, tiny remains
that would madden anthropologists
with their namelessness.
No records, just smells of stories
passing through most tenuous links,
2017