This week I want to offer three poems that I believe speak to the power of poetry to startle and reveal. Perhaps they also speak to our renewed need for poetry in a world of too much despair.\u00a0 Each of the three went \u201cviral,\u201d in response, respectively, to the refugee crisis, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the Pulse nightclub shooting. Volleyed around the globe, they survive; they are a way of happening.\u00a0 They are a mouth that has opened.<\/p>\n
Thank you to Fr. Staudenmaier for inviting me to share them.<\/p>\n
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I first read \u201cBullet Points\u201d on July 7th<\/sup>, one day after Philando Castile was shot to death, two days after Alton Sterling was killed.<\/p>\n Jericho Brown does not say their names, or the names of Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Michael Brown.\u00a0 And yet their lives, and deaths, breathe in this poem.\u00a0 It is not an easy poem\u2014it is angry, and it is afraid.<\/p>\n In the end of the poem, he says, in so many words, black lives matter.<\/p>\n \u201cBullet Points\u201d by <\/strong>Jericho Brown<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n I will not shoot myself ______________________________________<\/p>\n Mary-Catherine Harrison, Ph.D. Does poetry matter in the face of violence or suffering? Can words arranged on a page or spoken alter the facts of war or terror, racism, poverty? W. H. Auden, famously, said, \u201cpoetry makes nothing happen.\u201d\u00a0 And yet he wrote … Continue reading
\nIn the head, and I will not shoot myself
\nIn the back, and I will not hang myself
\nWith a trashbag, and if I do
\nI promise you, I will not do it
\nIn a police car while handcuffed
\nOr in the jail cell of a town
\nI only know the name of
\nBecause I have to drive through it
\nTo get home. Yes, I may be at risk,
\nBut I promise you, I trust the maggots
\nAnd the ants and the roaches
\nWho live beneath the floorboards
\nOf my house to do what they must
\nTo any carcass more than I trust
\nAn officer of the law of the land
\nTo shut my eyes like a man
\nOf God might, or to cover me with a sheet
\nSo clean my mother could have used it
\nTo tuck me in. When I kill me, I will kill me
\nThe same way most Americans do,
\nI promise you: cigarette smoke
\nOr a piece of meat on which I choke
\nOr so broke I freeze
\nIn one of these winters we keep
\nCalling worst. I promise that if you hear
\nOf me dead anywhere near
\nA cop, then that cop killed me. He took
\nMe from us and left my body, which is,
\nNo matter what we\u2019ve been taught,
\nGreater than the settlement a city can
\npay to a mother to stop crying, and more
\nBeautiful than the brand new shiny bullet
\nFished from the folds of my brain<\/p>\n![\"AmINext\"](\"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/170\/2016\/08\/AmINext.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Associate Professor of English, University of Detroit Mercy
\nCo-Director, University Honors Program
\nExecutive Director, Rx for Reading Detroit<\/a>
\nmc.harrison@udmercy.edu<\/a>
\n(313) 993-1081<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"