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little prayer

let ruin end here

let him find honey
where there was once a slaughter

let him enter the lion’s cage
& find a field of lilacs

let this be the healing
& if not let it be

From Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017). Copyright © 2017 by Danez Smith. Used by permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org.

More by Danez Smith

juxtaposing the black boy & the bullet

one is hard & the other tried to be

one is fast & the other was faster

                    one is loud & one is a song
                    with one note & endless rest

                     one's whole life is a flash

both spend their life
trying to find a warmth to call home

both spark quite the debate,
some folks want to protect them/some think we should just get rid
of the damn things all together.

Danez Smith

2014

it won’t be a bullet

becoming a little moon—brightwarm in me one night.

thank god. i can go quietly. the doctor will explain death

& i’ll go practice.

in the catalogue of ways to kill a black boy, find me

buried between the pages stuck together

with red stick. ironic, predictable. look at me.

i’m not the kind of black man who dies on the news.

i’m the kind who grows thinner & thinner & thinner

until light outweighs us, & we become it, family

gathered around my barely body telling me to go

toward myself.

Danez Smith

2017

a note on the body

your body still your body

your arms still wing

your mouth still a gun

you tragic, misfiring bird

you have all you need to be a hero

don’t save the world, save yourself

you worship too much & you worship too much

when prayer doesn’t work: dance, fly, fire

this is your hardest scene

when you think the whole sad thing might end

but you live oh, you live

everyday you wake you raise the dead

everything you do is a miracle

Danez Smith

2017

© Academy of American Poets, 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038