UPON Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, New Museum, New York, 2021. / DOUBLE SONNET after A.J., C.S.D., C.G., J.B., D.R., P.C., M.B., K.G., K.W., M.E., K.B., E.G., M.D. & R.S.

for Okwui Enwezor

Firehose blast pummels. Torqued silhouettes.
Teach me how to Dougie…We don’t succumb.
Everything that stood in their way…ruthless
destruction…for which tool brazen Diamond

hammers back against murder. Article:
Philando’s fiancé booked. Our assault
maps. Bradford’s built paper, string tactical 
veins pulse in black crumples. Forearms—Baller

K.G. (Celtics) seizes, spits. Gouache, white ink,
magenta mouth-stung light. Walker: We tried… 
Not venom, neurotoxins. Vomit pink—
Is it? Our exhaustion translates: We tried…

Bubble hoodie. Helmet-to-weave, No Rem,
M.E., welded steel: Lynch Fragments for them.   

Art mines, solders, bleeds. Angles as expect
orate to its hyphae. Roots—in Hyper 
cardioid and contact—mics—Dew, Pigment.  
Beasley and Gallagher sinew lines, curve 

sensorium as polyurethane  
query: optic vertebrate, lexicon. 
Translucent human-gut spores. Body planes
used in the hi order for…your drill…Drum

Bits…/ntial…ad…FREE WORKSHOP will…i
of America…now…PUT YOUR HANDS UP 
AGAINST THE WALL! The building is on Fiiyy
yAAHH…got my 3 kids, and we bounced…Smoke rup

tures Alien’s proboscis…They don’ know… 
They don’ know…Pixels—blues, violet shadows.

Credit

Copyright © 2021 by Ronaldo V. Wilson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 28, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem

“This poem is a meditation on the Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America exhibit, curated by Okwui Enwezor at the New Museum, where I spent four to six hours per day looking, sitting, standing, dancing, walking, crouching, lying down, being near, and listening to the art, over the course of a week. As part of a double-sonnet sequence interrogating race and representation I explore how particular artists from the exhibit oscillate between modes of the figurative and the abstract to create embodied, material routes that cohere the torqued, yet fluid condition of capture and freedom of Black Being/s. My poem is in direct conversation with artists Arthur Jaffa, Charles Gaines, Mark Bradford, Kara Walker, Melvin Edwards, Kevin Beasley, Ellen Gallagher, and several shared interlocutors: Cali Swag District, James Baldwin, Diamond Reynolds, Philando Castille, Kevin Garnett, Michelle Dobyne, and Ridley Scott, each of whom help me to understand strategies of gesture, form, movement, and subjectivity; as well as vast lineages and imaginative possibilities in the face of traumatic history and everyday life.”
—Ronaldo V. Wilson