"Speak Now, Or Forever. Hold Your Peace." by Patricia Smith

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend May 30, 2018   Speak Now, Or Forever. Hold Your Peace.   Patricia Smith

Two weeks after 17 students were gunned down in Parkland, Fla., hundreds of worshippers clutching AR-15s slurped holy wine and exchanged or renewed wedding vows in a commitment ceremony at the World Peace and Unification Sanctuary in Newfoundland, Pa.   Draped in thick silk the hue of hemorrhage and bone, you fondle your butt stocks, muffled lust needles your cheeks. Your aim? To make America great. Again,   your terse-lipped Lord has nudged you into the glare—numbed and witless in His name, you preen and re-glue blessed unions, mistake America straight, contend   your unloosed crave for the sugared heat of triggers. Besotted beneath your crowns of unspent shells, you hard-rhyme vows and quake, aware of that weight again,   the gawky, feral gush of fetish. Every uncocked groom and rigid bride is greased and un-tongued, struck dumb by what's at stake. A miracle waits. You men   and women kaboom your hearts with skewered Spam and searing pink Walmart wine, graze idly on ammo and blood-frosted cake. A prayer is the bait. Amen   woos guests in their ball gowns and bird suits, hallows your blind obsession with your incendiary intended. Though you've faked America, hate upends   all this odd holy—its frayed altars, fumbled psalms, assault rifles chic in itty veils. And we marvel at this outbreak, bewaring that gate again,   left unlatched so this bright foolish can flow through. This ilk of stupid blares blue enough to rouse ancestors—y'all 'bout to make Amiri berate again,   'bout to conjure Fannie Lou and her tree-trunk wrists. While you snot-weep, caress mute carbines, wed your unfathomable ache, America waits. 'Cause when   the sacrament cools, and the moon is pocked with giggling, who'll fall naked first, whose shuddering tongue will dare the barrel? Take that dare. Consummate. And then,   whose blood will that be?                Copyright © 2018 Patricia Smith. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "Where else, under the thin guise of renewing their human-to-human vows, could stiffly-garbed patriots commit romantically to each other with their firearms by their sides? We're all living in a twenty-four-hour Walmart; it's 2:43 a.m., and, once again, common sense is not for sale. And as for using 45's popular, stomach-churning refrain as the core of the ghazal—how could I not?" —Patricia Smith   Patricia Smith is the author of eight books of poetry, including Incendiary Art (TriQuarterly Books, 2017), winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Book Prize, the 2018 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work—Poetry, and finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize. She also authored Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House Press, 2012), winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, given by the Academy of American Poets. A professor at the College of Staten Island and at Sierra Nevada College's MFA program, she lives in Howell, New Jersey.   Photo credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths Poetry by Smith   Incendiary Art (TriQuarterly Books, 2017) "The Family Sells the Family Gun" by Brenda Hillman "26" by Rachel Eliza Griffiths "After Every There 3" by Sally Van Doren May Guest Editor: Matthew Shenoda   Thanks to Matthew Shenoda, author of Tahrir Suite: Poems (TriQuarterly Books, 2014), who curated Poem-a-Day this month. Read more about Shenoda and our guest editors for the year. Help Support Poem-a-Day   If you value Poem-a-Day, please consider a monthly donation or one-time gift to help make it possible. Poem-a-Day is the only digital series publishing new, previously unpublished work by today's poets each weekday morning. The free series, which also features a curated selection of classic poems on weekends, reaches 450,000+ readers daily. Thank you! 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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