Magnitude and Bond

More than anything, I need this boy

so close to my ears, his questions

electric as honeybees in an acreage

of goldenrod and aster. And time where

we are, slow sugar in the veins

of white pine, rubbery mushrooms

cloistered at their feet. His tawny

listening at the water’s edge, shy

antlers in pooling green light, while

we consider fox prints etched in clay.

I need little black boys to be able to be

little black boys, whole salt water galaxies

in cotton and loudness—not fixed

in stunned suspension, episodes on hot

asphalt, waiting in the dazzling absence

of apology. I need this kid to stay mighty

and coltish, thundering alongside

other black kids, their wrestle and whoop,

the brightness of it—I need for the world

to bear it. And until it will, may the trees

kneel closer, while we sit in mineral hush,

together. May the boy whose dark eyes

are an echo of my father’s dark eyes,

and his father’s dark eyes, reach

with cupped hands into the braided

current. The boy, restless and lanky, the boy

for whom each moment endlessly opens,

for the attention he invests in the beetle’s

lacquered armor, each furrowed seed

or heartbeat, the boy who once told me

the world gives you second chances, the boy

tugging my arm, saying look, saying now.

Credit

Copyright © 2019 by Nicole Terez Dutton. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 25, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem

“This poem, which borrows its title from a line the Gwendolyn Brooks poem ‘Paul Robeson,’ began as a remembrance of my father who was an enormously joyful person with a keen eye and a mischievous sense of humor. As a doctor my father spent his days helping people through their trauma, and many evenings relaxing with his dogs in the woods outside our house, listening. Sometimes I sat with him and listened while he pointed out deer or the sound of bullfrogs; it was his way to be curious, alert to the world, receptive. Like my father, my son is watcher, attentive to things large and small, a good listener, present. This poem carries the hope that I learned the things my father taught well, and that in spite of any and everything else, should he need it, something of my father’s gentleness and strength, something of those slow, wooded evenings, will be here in these lines for my boy.”

—Nicole Terez Dutton