Everybody’s Autobiography

Tracy K. Smith

1972 –

I find myself most alone
When I believe I am striving for glory.

These times, cool and sharp,
A monument of moon-white stone

lodges in place near my heart.
In a dream, my children

Glisten inside raindrops, or teardrops.
Like strangers, like seeds of children.

I will only be allowed to claim them
if I consent to love everyone’s children.

If I consent to love everyone’s children,
Only then will I be allowed to claim them,

My strangers, my seeds of children,
Glistening inside raindrops or teardrops

In my dream. Children
Lodged in place near my heart—

A monument of moon-white stone,
Cool and sharp.

I believe I am striving for glory
When I find myself most alone.

Tracy K. Smith is the author of Such Color: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2021), Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018), winner of the 2019 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, Life on Mars (Graywolf Press, 2011), winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Duende (Graywolf Press, 2007), which received the 2006 James Laughlin Award. Smith served as the poet laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019.

Themes

About this Poem

“This poem emerged from a dream that challenged me to embrace a wider radius of compassion in my daily living. It has, for me, become a kind of psalm for living in a world at war, and maintaining an investment in the safety and sanctity of strangers.”
—Tracy K. Smith

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[The will to see oneself as fragile]

The will to see oneself as
fragile, fallible,
liable to fail.

To consider a stranger and
hear, in the mind’s ear,
one’s true voice

insisting: I must change.
Ordinary people do this
Patient urgent work

alone and together
day upon day upon day.
Like my mother, once,

leading her ailing mother
back through the maze
of our suburban scrawl,

past ache, past haze,
past confusion and rage
toward a neat room

Tracy K. Smith

2023

We Feel Now A Largeness Coming On

Being called all manner of things
from the Dictionary of Shame—
not English, not words, not heard,
but worn, borne, carried, never spent—
we feel now a largeness coming on,
something passing into us. We know
not in what source it was begun, but
rapt, we watch it rise through our fallen,

Tracy K. Smith

2021

Mothership

You cannot see the Mothership in space,
It and She being made of the same thing.

All our mothers hover there in the ceaseless
blue-black, watching it ripple and dim

to the prized pale blue in which we spin—
we who are Black, and you, too. Our mothers

Tracy K. Smith

2021

Poems

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Everybody’s Autobiography

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