A Reason to be Angry
I made mosaics
laid my heart’s tiles on display.
Now, you walk on them.
Copyright © 2016 by Andrea Sanderson. This poem originally appeared in Texas Observer, January 2016. Used with permission of the author.
A cross-country, exquisite corpse by thirteen regional poet laureate fellows from our 2021-2022 cohort examining the role of a laureate in community.
Always a shift in definitions:
auteur author into community worker,
not we are here to hear your voice
but are here to give us voice
(we seem to have mislaid it on the way
to society, did you bring a flashlight?)
Call it impropriety — we aim to misbehave.
To remind you all your money is no remedy
for the grave.
She went from a shutter to silence
Eyes glazed over with the void of stillness.
As if illness suffocated the sight right out of her sockets.
A pocket of air emptied out of her wrinkled throat
One last hallowed gasp before she passed
and the cloak of death covered over her frigid soul.
Nigra sum, nigra sum sed Formosa
I am that opal colored onyx stone. Black bone soul
jones in the midnight dreary.
My soul is a weary kind of blues; and you know me
for my ebony hues. Nigra sum.