“John Henry" by TJ Jarrett

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend May 9, 2017   John Henry   TJ Jarrett

If you believe what you hear, he was everywhere from Virginia to Alabama just beyond every holler.   Which is to say he was everywhere and everywhere he was, he was unwanted. In one story, they say it   happened because if a white man said it happened, then it happened. In another, he was a prisoner which   is more plausible because only a man who lives in darkness can be felled by the light. But if it happened that often,   there had to be more than one, or maybe it was everyone or all of us and maybe he stood down there at the cold face   shoulders stooped and begged a mountain move which we all have done some time or another. Maybe he   prayed for strength to move it as we do some time or another. But this we can say is true: the world sent   a man down into the earth one day—the same world who fixed his shackles, closed each door, the world   which said no, and no, and no like so many stones. The world sent a man into the earth one day to leave   him. That man emerged from the earth with one word that the earth had been holding, and in that moment   he broke the earth, stumbled out into the chilly air before he fell, he brought this one word to us. Liar.            Copyright © 2017 TJ Jarrett. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "I'd been thinking about work and what women and persons of color endure. I thought of John Henry who (after a short Google search) appeared to have been in every town and died a thousand times for the singular crime of excellence." —TJ Jarrett   TJ Jarrett is the author of Zion (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014). She works as a software developer and lives in Nashville, Tennessee.    Photo credit: Dennis Wile  Poetry by Jarrett   Zion (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014) "Self-Portrait as the Bootblack in Daguerre's Boulevard du Temple" by Robin Coste Lewis "from One With Others" by C. D. Wright "Plantation" by Charif Shanahan Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends.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