Author: Patricia Smith
Published: May 27, 1998
Last Updated: May 20, 1999
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On good writing

Patricia Smith, the 1998 ASNE Distinguished Writing Award winner for commentary, is a poet. She read this poem at the convention.

(For the 6th grade class of Lillie C. Evans School, Liberty City, Miami)

I am astounded at their mouthful names —
Lakinishia, Fumilayo, Chevellanie, Delayo —
their ragged rebellions and lipglossed pouts,
and all those pants drooped as drapery.
I rejoice when they kiss my face, whisper wet
and urgent in my ear, make me their obsession
because I have brought them poetry.
They shout raw, bruise my wrists with pulling
and brashly claim me as mama as they rip me
from the cross and cradle my head in their little laps
waiting for new words to grow in my mouth.

You. You. You.
Angry, jubilant, weeping writers — we are all
saviors, reluctant Jesuses in the limelight,
but you knew that, didn’t you? Then let us
bless this sixth grade class, 40 nappy heads,
40 cracking voices, and all of them
raise their hands when I ask. They have all seen
the Reaper, grim in his heavy robe,
pushing the button for the dead project elevator,
begging for a break at the corner pawn shop,
cackling wildly in the back pew of the Baptist church.

I ask the death question and forty brown fists
punch the air, me!, me!, and O’Neal,
matchstick crack child, watched his mother’s
body become a claw and 9-year-old Tiko Jefferson,
barely big enough to lift the gun, fired a bullet
into his own throat after mama bended his back
with a lead pipe. Tamika cried into a sofa pillow
when daddy blasted mama into the north wall
of their cluttered one-room apartment,
Donya’s cousin gone in a driveby. Dark window,
click, click, gone, says Donya, her tiny finger
a barrel, the thumb a hammer. I am astonished
at their losses — and yet when I read a poem
about my own hard-eyed teenager, Jeffery asks
He is dead yet?
It cannot be comprehended,
my 18-year-old still pushing and pulling
his own breath. And 40 faces pity me,
knowing that I will soon be as they are,
numb to our bloodied histories,
favoring the Reaper with a thumbs up and a wink,
hearing the question and screeching me, me,
Miss Smith, I know somebody dead!

Can poetry hurt us? They ask me before
snuggling inside my words to sleep. I love you,
Nicole says, Nicole wearing my face,
pimples peppering her nose, and she is as black
as angels are. Nicole’s braids clipped, their ends
kissed with match flame to seal them, and can you
teach me to write a poem about my mother?
I mean, you write about your daddy and he dead,
can you teach me to remember my mama?
A teacher tells me this is the first time Nicole
has admitted that her mother is gone,
murdered by slim silver needles and a stranger
rifling through her blood, the virus pushing
her skeleton through for Nicole to see.
And now this child with rusty knees and
mismatched shoes sees poetry as her scream
and asks me for the words to build her mother
again, replacing the voice, stitching on the lost flesh.

So writers,
as we pick up our pens,
as we flirt and sin and rejoice behind microphones —
remember Nicole.
She knows that we are here now,
and she is an empty vessel waiting to be filled.

And she is waiting.

And she is waiting.

And she waits.

Smith is the author of three books of poetry — "Close to Death," "Big Towns, Big Talk" and "Life According to Motown." "Africans in Africa," a companion book to an upcoming PBS series on the slave trade in America, is due out in January.