Poem of the Week: Joshua Bennett

 

Theodicy

for Renisha McBride

When yet another one of your kin falls,

you question God’s wingspan, the architecture

of mercy. It is Friday morning, & despair

is the only law

left intact. No one knows how to stop

the bleeding. This many black bodies deep,

the synonymy between ropes & gunfire is lost

on no one, you assume. You assumed, brother,

that this was your solitary cross, the only anguish

your daughter might actually be spared: the bulls-eye,

its glare, this hunt you know better than any other algorithm:

subtraction by bullet, our daily negation, how ageless it is,

the laughter too, yes, the grisly surprise

of every birthday past the age of 18,

the music we have yet to invent

for mourning this specific.

Detroit wails in the wake of a shotgun blast

& you do not know how to write

what you can’t imagine the end of.

Why don’t we grieve for women,

for girls, the same way we do

our men, our vanishing boys?

Perhaps it is this body, ever mutable

in its danger, always shifting between target

& terror that demands too much

recognition, this history of sons swinging

& drowned & cut up & caged

which elides revision, leaves no space

for other grief. Genuflected by disbelief,

you spend entire nights alone,

folded into the shape of a mouth,

cursing the limits of strength.

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Used with permission.

To hear Bennett read this poem, please visit his contribution to #BlackPoetsSpeakOut. “I am a black poet who will not remain silent while this nation murders black people. I have a right to be angry.”

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Joshua Bennett hails from Yonkers, NY. He is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at Princeton University, and has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University, the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, and the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. Winner of the 2014 Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, his work has been published or is forthcoming in Anti-, Blackbird, Callaloo, Drunken Boat, Obsidian and elsewhere. Joshua is also the founding editor of Kinfolks: a journal of black expression.

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If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.  

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If you are still planning to submit to our Virtual Open Mic: Poems that Resist Police Brutality and Demand Racial Justice the mic is still hot. Six posts and counting. Thank you who have, and who yet will share this witness with us.