Ode to the Head Nod
the slight angling up of the forehead
neck extension quick jut of chin
meeting the strangers’ eyes
a gilded curtsy to the sunfill in another
in yourself tithe of respect
in an early version the copy editor deleted
the word “head” from the title
the copy editor says it’s implied
the copy editor means well
the copy editor means
she is only fluent in one language of gestures
i do not explain i feel sad for her
limited understanding of greetings & maybe
this is why my acknowledgements are so long;
didn’t we learn this early?
to look at white spaces
& find the color
thank god o thank god for
you
are here.
Copyright © 2020 by Elizabeth Acevedo. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 22, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I am working on a series of odes based on small gestures: how Dominicans point with our mouths, how children learn intimacy through childhood games, how Black folks say hello with a head nod. This poem is very much based in the literal situation: can a piece of text hold the friction of a writer writing specifically about such in-group gestures being edited by a well-meaning outsider who ‘corrects’ the language? I wanted to sit with what it means to not only have language lost in translation, but being told even our embraces, our greetings, often color outside the lines of the literary stylebook.”
—Elizabeth Acevedo
Elizabeth Acevedo
Elizabeth Acevedo is author of Beastgirl and Other Origin Myths (YesYes Books, 2016), as well as the novels Clap When You Land (Quill Tree Books, 2020); With the Fire on High (Quill Tree Books, 2019); and THE POET X (HarperTeen, 2018), which won the 2018 National Book Award in Young People’s Literature. She holds a BA from George Washington University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Maryland. Acevedo is a National Poetry Slam Champion and lives in Washington, D.C.