Come. Pray. Know
- come. pray. know histories. today
is mother’s birthday. she insists on
dying. offer her a framed memory,
her maiden name clotted in a map older
than “america.” she will refuse, turn
away. grief sharpens the gales of wit.
again, she abandons.
- a twice born girl knows to rotate a tomb,
suspend mother’s crude gape, temper
a piston with cane syrup. terror is the knotty
clutch of an umbilical cord, an archive pulsing
with the carriage
of empires.
Copyright © 2025 by DaMaris B. Hill. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 1, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I think a lot about the invisible and ever present, the theories associated with dark matter, the eighty-five percent of the universe we cannot see using light, and the weight of what has yet to be known. Therefore, I believe each poem is comprised of questions and wonder. In these contemporary moments, my wonder is polluted by ideas of geography and ‘home.’ This poem is questioning—does home exist in the moments we are cradling mothers preparing to leave the physical body behind? How can children of any age come to know a mother as an authentic individual? And then, are we meant to?”
—DaMaris B. Hill
DaMaris B. Hill
DaMaris B. Hill is a poet and scholar. She is the author of Blood Bible: An American History (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2026) and Breath Better Spent: Living Black Girlhood (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022).
Hill is a 2024–25 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University and a fellow with the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Kentucky.