Seer
Last night
you look
at me hard
then soft
like you see
something
old and sad
in me.
From Back of Mount Peace. Copyright © 2010 by Kwame Dawes. Used with the permission of Peepal Tree Press.
Poems
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Purple
For Akua
Walking, I drew my hand over the lumpy
bloom of a spray of purple; I stripped away
my fingers, stained purple; put it to my nose,
the minty honey, a perfume so aggressively
pleasant—I gave it to you to smell,
my daughter, and you pulled away as if
2019
Dirt
I got one part of it. Sell them watermelons and get me another part. Get Bernice to sell that piano and I’ll have the third part.
—August Wilson
2017
A Way of Seeing
It all comes from this dark dirt,
memory as casual as a laborer.
Remembrances of ancestors
kept in trinkets, tiny remains
that would madden anthropologists
with their namelessness.
No records, just smells of stories
passing through most tenuous links,
2017