The Lost Woods as Elegy for Black Childhood by Derrick Austin

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend September 27, 2016   The Lost Woods as Elegy for Black Childhood   Derrick Austin

There used to be no one here, where cypresses and oaks play shadow puppets on sawgrass.   You heard the music before I did: tambourines, pan pipes. Remember how I woke clean   to meet you each morning? The dew and the dust? Remember how you’d catch me   as I fell from trees? Someone heard and hurt us. I’m Black-Eyed Pea. You’re just Skull Kid.   We wanted our genius to last. We never wanted chalkboards or snow. We never came home   before the streetlights buzzed. All we do is dance in leaves. Cackle and Dreaming, we call it.   Our mothers call it grief.              Copyright © 2016 Derrick Austin. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, a video game I loved as a child, the lost woods is a maze-like level full of music that transformed children who wandered in into monsters known as skull kids. Though they were trapped forever, they always looked like they were having fun playing flutes and being tricksters. I wrote this poem thinking about Korryn Gaines’s son, thinking about the nightmare of racial violence and about what space allows black children to dream and play without fear. —Derrick Austin   Derrick Austin is the author of Trouble the Water (BOA Editions, 2016). He teaches at the University of Wisconsin and lives in Madison, Wisconsin. Poetry by Austin   Trouble the Water (BOA Editions, 2016)  "Pomegranate Means Grenade" by Jamaal May "After David Hammons" by Claudia Rankine "Sticks" by Thomas Sayers Ellis Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038