the valley of its making by Nate Marshall

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend April 12, 2017   the valley of its making   Nate Marshall

for Page   poetry makes nothing happen —W. H. Auden   the people in the streets are plucked up like radishes from dark earth, heads beat the purplish-red of ripeness. the women lead the stupid & brutish to a future they don't deserve. the organized are still unbearably human, they still fuck & hurt & harm & are not actually sorry. the people still fight each other too much & the system not enough & too often it is not a fight but a bullet. too many men want to be in the front & don't want to march anywhere in particular. some of us have degrees & noses to look down.  so many want a version of old days that never existed. many are still unwilling to grow a vocabulary for personhood, even from the words already in them. so many will deny they to a sibling simply because. our people are messy & messed up & a mess. nothing about our people is romantic & it shouldn't be. our people deserve poetry without meter. we deserve our own jagged rhythm & our own uneven walk toward sun. you make happening happen. we happen to love. this is our greatest action.            Copyright © 2017 Nate Marshall. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "'the valley of its making' is a poem I wrote thinking about the movement for Black lives and my partner. She does a lot of work as an organizer and in our conversations we often think through what it means to believe in freedom even given the harsh realities of an imperfect world. The poem is thinking about how love can be one of those sites of freedom." —Nate Marshall   Nate Marshall is the author of Wild Hundreds (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015). He is the director of national programs of Young Chicago Authors and lives on the South Side of Chicago.   Photo credit: Reginald Eldridge Poetry by Marshall   Wild Hundreds (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015) "At Harlem Hospital across the street from the Schomburg the only thing to eat is a Big Mac" by Samiya Bashir "@ the Crossroads—A Sudden American Poem" by Juan Felipe Herrera "The neighbor's buddy watching my screen through the window" by francine j. harris Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. If you enjoy Poem-a-Day, please consider making a donation to help make it possible. 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

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