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“It is difficult to get the news from poems / yet (people) die miserably every day / for lack of what is found there.”
—William Carlos Williams
For G
I find myself
writing the same poem differently
over and over
again. I find myself writing
variations of the same poem
about hatefulness in America’s history,
current events, negative ‘ever-changing-same.’
Like Blake’s “London,” Hughes’ “Harlem,”
some of my poems have place names
for titles: Goree . . . Sanford, Ferguson, Cleveland,
Chicago, NYC, Baltimore, Charleston, Flint, Orlando,
Dallas, Tulsa. . . . Sometimes I find myself beside myself.
Though still centered in us in the U.S., lately I find
more of myself in other poets’ poems than in a mirror
and better reflected in, yes,
the up close dawn-lit opaline eyes and open arms
of a so-called “other’s” differently similar humanness,
and I find myself loved and in loving.