The Quarry's Top 10 Most-Viewed Poems of 2017

In 2017, readers turned most often to ten poems that affirm our humanity, mourn our wounds and loss, and that speak to us of reunion and joyful rebellion.

We are delighted to present the ten most-viewed poems published in Split This Rock’s social justice poetry database, The Quarry, in 2017. They represent this country’s greatest strength – the variety of our residents' backgrounds and the clarifying views they offer on living this human and troubled American life. In 2017 the all-time most read poems changed to the top two poems of 2017. Previously the All Time Number 1 Poem was Ross Gay’s “A Small Needful Fact,”and still holds at Number 3 since The Quarry went online. You may read previous collections of most-viewed poems on Blog This Rock.

Many of these top ten poems also happen to connect to Split This Rock’s history and directly to our work in 2017. Amanda Gorman, the first US Youth Poet Laureate, offered her inaugural poem for Poem of the Week. Melissa Tuckey is a co-founder of the organization, and the poems by Keno Evol, Purvi Shah, and Keith Wilson all placed in the Sonia Sanchez-Langston Hughes Poetry Contest in 2017.  Richard Blanco featured at Richard Blanco featured at Split This Rock’s fifth anniversary celebration, and Aracelis Girmay featured at the poetry festival in 2016. Both of their poems were part of a special portfolio edition of Poem of the Week published on inauguration day 2017.

Kazim Ali will feature at this year’s Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness in Washington, DC from April 19 through April 21, along with Elizabeth Acevedo, Kazim Ali, Ellen Bass, Sherwin Bitsui, Kwame Dawes, Camille Dungy, Ilya Kaminsky, Sharon Olds, Sonia Sanchez, Solmaz Sharif, Terisa Siagatonu, Paul Tran, Javier Zamora! We do hope you can join us. Early bird rates are available until February 23! Visit Split This Rock's website for details.

2017’s most-viewed poems run the gamut from mourning to celebration. These poems mourn our distance from the future world we deserve. These poems provoke us to embrace and behold each other. These poems witness the way to a future we know is possible. That future is a social world organized with our dignity at its center. That future ennobles us, lets us live in cooperation with nature, in our varied and glorious bodies, sustained by the many shapes and textures of our love. That future lets us share stories and languages and practices, lets us share all of them knowing they will be honored for the sacred inheritance they are.

In these ten poems, and all the poems of The Quarry, we can hear intimations of the future we mean to live, we can hear her warm breath singing full-throated and ready.

  

1   Declaration of Interdependence, by Richard Blanco

2   YOU ARE WHO I LOVE, by Aracelis Girmay

3   Do You Speak Persian, by Kaveh Akbar

4   Politics of an Elegy, by Hieu Mihn Nguyen

5   In This Place (An American Lyric), by Amanda Gorman

6   Shooting for the Sky, by Purvi Shah

7   Requiem, Melissa Tuckey

8   Peach, by Kazim Ali

9   Black Matters, by Keith Wilson

10 On Meeting a Brother for the First Time, by Keno Evol

We invite readers to find these poem in The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database, along with their 475-plus kin, to find in these poems the sense of belonging that fuels the long work of resistance and imagination. The poems are searchable by social justice theme and indexed to encourage discovery.

We hear of the poems being used by teachers in classrooms, for writing workshops, in vigils, performances, worship services, and more! The poems are traveling the country and the world with their witness and their provocation. Everywhere these poems are read, they insist that the beloved community Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of is not a lost idea and that our path to a just and thriving world begins with seeing each other clearly, with generous vision.

In Split This Rock’s tenth anniversary year, we are firming up plans to expand The Quarry’s reach even further, so it continues to function not only as a repository of excellent poetry, but as an active tool for those who seek to make justice present in our time. We’re always open to innovative ideas from Splitistas– for organizing, teaching, worship, reflection. Email your story of using The Quarry to info@splitthisrock.org.

M. F. Simone Roberts
Managing Editor of The Quarry
Split This Rock Poetry & Social Justice Fellow

2018 Pushcart Nominations from Split This Rock!

Split This Rock is very pleased to announce our nominations for the 2018 Pushcart Prize. We are inspired by these six poets and their poems of witness! 

These poems -- some which were published as part of a special Inauguration Day Poem of the Week collection -- offer fuel for truth-telling and protest, for beckoning a new world that celebrates us all, for the rally and comfort of solidarity. 

.......... Richard Blanco, Declaration of Inter-Dependence
              Aracelis Girmay, YOU ARE WHO I LOVE
.......... Minal Hajratwala, ‘I am broken by the revolt exploding inside me’...........
.......... Danez Smith, Our Moveable Mecca
.......... Vincent Toro, Vox Populi for the Marooned
              Sally Wen Mao, Aubade with Gravel and Gold

The selected poems, like the six we nominated for Best of the Net 2017, are poems we return to over and over to keep us refreshed, focused, and awake to possibility in these difficult times. We hope they nourish you as well!

***

You may visit these and over 475 other poems of provocation and witness in The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database -- a searchable collection of poems by a diverse array of contemporary socially engaged poets, published by Split This Rock since 2009. Like all of Split This Rock’s programs, The Quarry is designed to bring poetry fully to the center of public life.

Searchable by social justice theme, author’s identity, state, and geographic region, this database is a unique, rich resource. The Quarry offers poems that will inform and inspire you, your peers, and all with whom you work and collaborate. 

You might not only read these poems but use them to keep yourself grounded, to open meetings, to share among discussion groups, to email to representatives to encourage them to keep working for the general welfare, or to share with those who might benefit from perspectives different from their own. 

Statement by Split This Rock in Solidarity with Charlottesville and All Those Working to End White Supremacy

At Split This Rock we are heartsick at the murder and other violence committed by white supremacist nationalists over the weekend in Charlottesville, VA. We know these actions are of a piece with our nation’s long bloody history of genocide and exploitation. And we know that one of the powerful tools of repression is silencing, in this case insisting that the American story is the story of whiteness.

As ever, poets are rewriting that narrative.

The poets of the Split This Rock community come from the groups white supremacists aim to silence, dominate, or destroy outright: we are queer, we are people of color, we are people with disabilities, we are women, we are people of many faiths and no faith, we are white allies, and we are progressives. 

We are powerful visionaries and chroniclers, we are fierce advocates and activists. Split This Rock poets have long offered necessary poetic witness of, and protest against, both the oppression advocated by racist and anti-Semitic neo-Nazis and their ilk and the harm we suffer at the hands of racist institutions.

In this terrible moment, in support of all who seek a world free of hatred and oppression, we offer selected poems from The Quarry, excerpted below, in praise of resistance and social justice movements -- tinged with hurt, hope, and joy -- reminders of our communities’ resilience. 

Photo by Eze Amos: ezeamosphotography.com

We offer these poems to nourish liberation and justice movements and to sustain you, the brave Americans who join them and lead them. We offer these poems as a call to renew and deepen -- yet again -- our commitments to each other and to our claims to the American story.

Should you want them as well, The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database is also home to many powerful poems that address themes of racism, violence, police brutality, and the several intersecting injustices that affect our communities and our earth. We offer too the YouTube channels of Split This Rock and the DC Youth Slam Team, where you’ll find performances of striking power and beauty. Please feel free to share all these resources.

Solidarity events are everywhere this week. Find one near you at the website of Indivisible. You can organize your own and register it on their website as well. Bring a poem to read – one offered below or one of your own or any that speaks the grief, power, and resilience you seek and find in speaking out and acting against injustice. Jewish Voice for Peace lists several places to donate on their website. 

With poetry on our lips and our fists in the air,

Split This Rock

***

Poems in Solidarity With Charlottesville from The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database

NOTE: In most cases these are excerpts. To read the full poem and to learn more about the poet, please click on the link below the excerpt.


Vox Populi for the Marooned     
By Vincent Toro

We will break nothing when we leave, bind ourselves like cloth around
a fevered chest, float across plazas like a warm sponge over a sore shin,
and become a shameless shore of sin carousing, a flesh tinted mandala

of static bribing the sky with the promise that we will gather here each
day until fear is in need of hospice. And we will come bearing incense
and peach pie. And whenever the wounds of injustice are salted in our

favelas we will gather again in the squares of Tiananmen and Taksim,
of Tahrir and Trafalgar, of Bolivar and Union. Like barnacles or fluorescent
algae, we will gather… we will gather… we will gather…

http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/vox-populi-for-the-marooned


YOU ARE WHO I LOVE    
By Aracelis Girmay

You protecting the river   You are who I love
delivering babies, nursing the sick

You with henna on your feet and a gold star in your nose

You taking your medicine, reading the magazines

You looking into the faces of young people as they pass, smiling and saying, Alright! which, they know it, means I see you, Family. I love you. Keep on.

http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/you-are-who-i-love


Our Movable Mecca
By Danez Smith

    we who were born into conundrum, came into the world as the world was leaving, children of the ozone, the oppressed, the overlooked, of obtuse greed, of oil overlords, of oblong definitions of justice

    who asked for water & were given a border, a wall in the ocean, a wall in the air, a wall right down the middle of our bodies, bodies left to sun dry, bodies
told they were barely bodies, bodies emptied of blood & rights, bodies whispered into rumor

    who were hungry & were given a cell to hunger in & sometimes saw our own flesh transfigured into prisons, running in circles trying to escape ourselves

http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/our-movable-mecca


Declaration of Inter-Dependence
By Richard Blanco

We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor…

We’re the living who light vigil candles and the cop who didn’t shoot. We’re the inmate with his volunteer teacher diagraming sentences, the Buddhist alongside the stockbroker serving soup at a shelter. We’re the grandfather taking a selfie with his grandson and his husband, the widow’s fifty cents in the collection plate and the golfer’s ten-thousand-dollar pledge for a cure.

We hold these truths to be self-evident…

We’re them. They’re you. You’re me. We’re us: a handshake, a smile good morning on the bus, a door held open, a seat we give up on the subway. We tend restrooms or sell art, make huevos rancheros or herbed salmon, run for mayor or restock shelves, work a backhoe or write poems. We’re a poem in progress.

http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/declaration-of-inter-dependence


Ode To What We Make
By Kathy Engel

and praise the longed for moon
casting the night, the heaving rain,
its wet coat, praise each alphabet’s
lonely letter clamoring for light,
resisting the end of memory, the
end of touch, each cell and clot
still alive in any language,
still gorgeous, to be invented,
praise the clumsiness of this
word sharpening its animal teeth
for the love of the cub.

http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/ode-to-what-we-make


‘I am broken by the revolt exploding inside me’
By Minal Hajratwala

Your rage is the fulcrum of your desire, chimaerae busting out of cages, heart-sparks flying. Your rage gets shit done & it is no joke. Your rage is the luminous gold truth of sunrise, what you sit with long enough to dissolve your fear. Your rage is a checkmate to your compromise. Your rage is heat from a magnifying glass, focused, bursting into flame.

http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/i-am-broken-by-the-revolt


Til the Taste of Free in Our Mouths (Brown Baby
Lullaby)
By Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes

      Wake baby, wake child, this lullaby will break the cage

You will taste the blood of your brothers in our milk, remembering

their glorious beauty as it warms your throat, you will

not know the cold of the concrete that swallowed them whole.

We are a swarm, a pride, a righteous and thick army

http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/til-the-taste-of-free


Stand
By Ruth Forman

why so afraid to stand up?
someone will tell you
sit down?

but here is the truth
someone will always tell you
sit down

the ones we remember
kept standing

http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/stand


Hold
By Gowri Koneswaran

hold hands when
they come calling,
when they threaten,
"this is necessary to
teach you a lesson" or
"this is necessary
to protect you"

hold hands when we stand still,
when we walk, when
we run
when they tell us to
surrender
when they tell us
to do anything

http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/hold


The World We Want Is Us
By Alice Walker

It moves my heart to see your awakened faces;
the look of "aha!"
shining, finally, in
so many
wide open eyes.
Yes, we are the 99%
all of us
refusing to forget
each other

http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/the-world-we-want-is-us


from Say Yes
By Andrea Gibson

‘cause tonight Saturn is on his knees
proposing with all of his ten thousand rings
that whatever song we’ve been singing we sing even more.
The world needs us right now more than it ever has before.
Pull all your strings.
Play every chord.

http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/from-say-yes

Poem of the Week: Richard Blanco

            

Excerpt from "One Today"

 

All of us as vital as the one light we move through,
the same light on blackboards with lessons for the day:
equations to solve, history to question, or atoms imagined,
the "I have a dream" we keep dreaming,
or the impossible vocabulary of sorrow that won't explain
the empty desks of twenty children marked absent
today, and forever. Many prayers, but one light
breathing color into stained glass windows,
life into the faces of bronze statues, warmth
onto the steps of our museums and park benches
as mothers watch children slide into the day.

One ground. Our ground, rooting us to every stalk
of corn, every head of wheat sown by sweat
and hands, hands gleaning coal or planting windmills
in deserts and hilltops that keep us warm, hands
digging trenches, routing pipes and cables, hands
as worn as my father's cutting sugarcane
so my brother and I could have books and shoes.

The dust of our farms and deserts, cities and plains
mingled by one wind -- our breath. Breathe. Hear it
through the day's gorgeous din of honking cabs,
buses launching down avenues, the symphony
of footsteps, guitars, and screeching subways,
the unexpected song bird on your clothes line.

-Richard Blanco 

Used by permission. Read the full poem here.

Richard Blanco, a first-generation Cuban American, was chosen by President Obama as the 2013 Inaugural Poet. His three books of poems are City of a Hundred Fires, winner of the Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press; Directions to The Beach of the Dead, winner of the Beyond Margins Award from the PEN American Center; and 2012's Looking for The Gulf Motel, winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award.  

 

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

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

MAY Sunday Kind of Love: Richard Blanco and Sami Miranda

MAY

Sunday Kind of Love
Featuring 

Richard Blanco & Sami Miranda 

  
Sunday May 19, 2013
5-7m Busboys & Poets 
2021 14th St. NW Washington, DC 20009 
Hosted by Sarah Browning and Katy Riche
5$ online or at the door
As always, open mic follows! 
Co-sponsored by Busboys and Poets & Split This Rock   

Richard Blanco's acclaimed first book of poetry, City of a Hundred Fires, explores the yearnings and negotiation of cultural identity as a Cuban- American, and received the Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press. His second book, Directions to The Beach of the Dead, won the Beyond Margins Award from the PEN American Center for its continued exploration of the universal themes of cultural identity and homecoming. Looking for The Gulf Motel, (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012) examines the blurred lines of gender, the frailty of his father-son relationship, and the intersection of his cultural and sexual identities as a Cuban-American gay man living in rural 

In January 2013, Blanco was selected by President Obama to be the inaugural poet, joining the ranks of Robert Frost and Maya Angelou.

Blanco's poems have appeared in top literary journals, including The Nation, the New Republic, Ploughshares, Michigan Quarterly Review, and TriQuarterly Review; and several anthologies including, The Best American Poetry, Great American Prose Poems, Breadloaf Anthology of New American Poets, and American Poetry: The Next Generation. Blanco is recipient of two Florida Artist Fellowships, a Residency Fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and is a John Ciardi Fellow of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. A builder of cities as well as poems, he holds a bachelors of science degree in Civil Engineering and a Master in Fine Arts in Creative Writing.

Sami Miranda is an educator, poet and visual artists who makes his home in Washington, DC. His work has been published in Al Pie De la Casa Blanca, Full Moon on K St, the Chiron Review, DC Poets Against the War Anthology, MiPoesias.com and Beltway among others.  He has performed at venues such as the Kennedy Center, The Smithsonian Museum of American Art, The Smithsonian Museum of African Art and GALA Theatre.  

Sami curated the Sabor Sunday reading series in Washington DC, that brought two poets, a trio of musicians and two visual artists into conversation. He is currently recording a jazz and poetry collaboration with bass player Pepe Gonzalez. He develops and facilitates interactive poetry workshops for youth and adults and holds an MFA from The Bennington Writing Seminars.

Poem of the Week: Richard Blanco

                                   
                                                                                
We were excited to hear that Split This Rock friend Richard Blanco had been chosen as the 2013 Inaugural Poet. Richard's poems have been an indispensable guide to growing up Cuban American and gay for many years. We recommend to you his three books, including Looking for the Gulf Motel, from which this week's poem is drawn. Congratulations to President Obama for his inclusive view of America and for his brilliant choice.

                                                    

Looking for The Gulf Motel 

Marco Island, Florida    

  

There should be nothing here I don't remember . . .

The Gulf Motel with mermaid lampposts
and ship's wheel in the lobby should still be
rising out of the sand like a cake decoration.
My brother and I should still be pretending
we don't know our parents, embarrassing us
as they roll the luggage cart past the front desk
loaded with our scruffy suitcases, two-dozen
loaves of Cuban bread, brown bags bulging
with enough mangos to last the entire week,
our espresso pot, the pressure cooker--and
a pork roast reeking garlic through the lobby.
All because we can't afford to eat out, not even
on vacation, only two hours from our home
in Miami, but far enough away to be thrilled
by whiter sands on the west coast of Florida,
where I should still be for the first time watching
the sun set instead of rise over the ocean.

There should be nothing here I don't remember . . . 

 

My mother should still be in the kitchenette
of The Gulf Motel, her daisy sandals from Kmart
squeaking across the linoleum, still gorgeous
in her teal swimsuit and amber earrings
stirring a pot of arroz-con-pollo, adding sprinkles
of onion powder and dollops of tomato sauce.
My father should still be in a terrycloth jacket
smoking, clinking a glass of amber whiskey
in the sunset at the Gulf Motel, watching us
dive into the pool, two boys he'll never see
grow into men who will be proud of him. 

 

There should be nothing here I don't remember . . . 

 

My brother and I should still be playing Parcheesi,
my father should still be alive, slow dancing
with my mother on the sliding-glass balcony
of The Gulf Motel. No music, only the waves
keeping time, a song only their minds hear
ten-thousand nights back to their life in Cuba.
My mother's face should still be resting against
his bare chest like the moon resting on the sea,
the stars should still be turning around them.

 

There should be nothing here I don't remember . . . 

 

My brother should still be thirteen, sneaking
rum in the bathroom, sculpting naked women
from sand. I should still be eight years old
dazzled by seashells and how many seconds
I hold my breath underwater--but I'm not.
I am thirty-eight, driving up Collier Boulevard,
looking for The Gulf Motel, for everything
that should still be, but isn't. I want to blame
the condos, their shadows for ruining the beach
and my past, I want to chase the snowbirds away
with their tacky mansions and yachts, I want
to turn the golf courses back into mangroves,
I want to find The Gulf Motel exactly as it was
and pretend for a moment, nothing lost is lost.

  

-Richard Blanco

 

From Looking for The Gulf Motel (University of Pittsburgh Press). Copyright © 2012 by Richard Blanco. Used by permission of Stuart Bernstein Representation for Artists, New York, NY and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. All rights reserved.  

Author photo by: Nico Tucci 

Richard Blanco's acclaimed first book, City of a Hundred Fires, explores the yearnings and negotiation of cultural identity as a Cuban-American, and received the prestigious Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press (1998). His second book, Directions to The Beach of the Dead (University of Arizona Press, 2005) won the 2006 PEN / American Beyond Margins Award for its continued exploration of the universal themes of home and place. His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies. Blanco is recipient of two Florida Artist Fellowships, a Residency Fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and is a John Ciardi Fellow of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. A builder of cities as well as poems, he holds a bachelors of science degree in Civil Engineering and a Master in Fine Arts in Creative Writing.  Blanco is the 2013 Inaugural Poet.

                                                              ~

Poem of the Week is a project of Split This Rock: Poetry of Provocation & Witness. Split This Rock is dedicated to integrating poetry into public life and supporting the poets who write and perform this vital work.

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

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