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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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
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
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