poets touch the wound

April 7, 2018 in poetry

Patricia Smith has been called “a testament to the power of words to change lives.” She is the author of seven books of poetry, including Incendiary Art(2017), winner of an NAACP Image Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (2012), which won the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler (2008), a chronicle of the human and environmental cost of Hurricane Katrina which was nominated for a National Book Award; and Teahouse of the Almighty, a 2005 National Poetry Series selection published by Coffee House Press. Her work has appeared in Poetry magazine, the Paris Review, the New York Times, TriQuarterly, Tin House, the Washington Post, and in both Best American Poetry and Best American Essays.

Her contribution to the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir, which she edited, won the Robert L. Fish Award from the Mystery Writers of America for the best debut story of the year and was chosen for Best American Mystery Stories 2013. Smith also penned the critically acclaimed history Africans in America (1999) and the award-winning children’s book Janna and the Kings(2003).

She is a 2014 Guggenheim fellow, a 2012 fellow at both MacDowell and Yaddo, a two-time Pushcart Prize winner, recipient of a Lannan fellowship and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history. She is currently working on a biography of Harriet Tubman, a poetry volume combining text and 19th century African-American photos, and a collaborative novel with her husband Bruce DeSilva, the Edgar-Award winning author of the Liam Mulligan crime novels. She will be a featured speaker at Life is a Verb Camp 2019.

Black, Poured Directly into the Wound

BY Patricia Smith

Prairie winds blaze through her tumbled belly, and Emmett’s

red yesterdays refuse to rename her any kind of mother.

A pudge-cheeked otherwise, sugar whistler, her boy is

(through the fierce clenching mouth of her memory) a

grays-and-shadows child. Listen. Once she was pretty.

Windy hues goldened her skin. She was pert, brown-faced,

in every wide way the opposite of the raw, screeching thing

chaos has crafted. Now, threaded awkwardly, she tires of the

sorries, the Lawd have mercies. Grief’s damnable tint

is everywhere, darkening days she is no longer aware of.

She is gospel revolving, repeatedly emptied of light, pulled

and caressed, cooed upon by strangers, offered pork and taffy.

Boys in the street stare at her, then avert their eyes, as if she

killed them all, shipped every one into the grips of Delta. She sits,

her chair carefully balanced on hell’s edge, and pays for sanity in

kisses upon the conjured forehead of her son. Beginning with A,

she recites (angry, away, awful) the alphabet of a world gone red.

Coffee scorches her throat as church ladies drift about her room,

black garb sweating their hips, filling cups with tap water, drinking,

drinking in glimpses of her steep undoing. The absence of a black

roomful of boy is measured, again, again. In the clutches of coffee,

red-eyed, Mamie knows their well-meaning murmur. One says She

a mama, still. Once you have a chile, you always a mama. Kisses

in multitudes rain from their dusty Baptist mouths, drowning her.

Sit still, she thinks, til they remember how your boy was killed.

She remembers. Gush and implosion, crushed, slippery, not a boy.

Taffeta and hymnals all these women know, not a son lost and

pulled from the wretched and rumbling Tallahatchie. Mamie, she

of the hollowed womb, is nobody’s mama anymore. She is

tinted echo, barren. Everything about her makes the sound sorry.

The white man’s hands on her child, dangled eye, twanging chaos,

things that she leans on, the only doors that open to let her in.

Faced with days and days of no him, she lets Chicago — windy,

pretty in the ways of the North — console her with its boorish grays.

A hug, more mourners and platters of fat meat. Will she make it through?

Is this how the face slap of sorrow changes the shape of a

mother? All the boys she sees now are laughing, drenched in red.

Emmett, in dreams, sings I am gold. He tells how dry it is, the prairie.

About Patti Digh

Patti Digh is an author, speaker, and educator who builds learning communities and gets to the heart of difficult topics. Her work over the last three decades has focused on diversity, inclusion, social justice, and living and working mindfully. She has developed diversity strategies and educational programming for major nonprofit and corporate organizations and has been a featured speaker at many national and international conferences.