Friday, October 4, 2013

Poem of the Week: Reginald Harris

      
 
Photo by: Ocean Morisset         

      
Baltimore Uproar by Romare Bearden 


Upton / Avenue Market Metro Station, Baltimore, Maryland


Get off here. This is a story you've
been told: these streets before the trash,
the rats, the crack-heads nodding to ghost
music. That past a distant gleam of notes,
sound-magicians dreaming, rising
from these streets: diminutive
personifications of the beat, rhythm
made compact flesh; flamboyant
fly-brimmed hipsters high on hi-de-ho,
lexographers of jive; and Our Dark Lady,
transformed from turning tricks to
trickster by the music, through her songs.

From The Avenue to the after-hours you
could hear it in the changes, the shift from
working day to glittering night. Shattering
twists of phrase calling out, the turn of a gloved
hand sheathed in silver from fingertip to elbow
to hide the tracks beneath. Rising from the
platform, the scent of gardenias is in the train's
retreating roar, leaving departing commuters
in spangled shards of sound. These multicolored stones
are her petals, a frozen music always calling,
calling back, urging on -- Rise up. Get off here. Rise
up

-Reginald Harris 

(From Autogeography, Nortwestern University Press, 2013)  
Used by permission.

Reginald Harris is the Poetry In The Branches Coordinator and Information Technology Director for Poets House in New York City. He won the 2012 Cave Canem/Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize for Autogeography. A Pushcart Prize Nominee, recipient of Individual Artist Awards for both poetry and fiction from the Maryland State Arts Council, and Finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and the ForeWord Book of the Year for 10 Tongues: Poems (2002), his work has appeared in numerous journals, anthologies, and other publications. An Associate Editor for Lambda Literary Foundation's Lambda Literary Review, he lives in Brooklyn, where he pretends to work on another manuscript. 

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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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