Only together holding their hands in silence can I see what a field has doneto my mother, aunts and uncles.The land around my grandmother’sold tin roof has changed,I doubt she’d recognize it from above.How many blackbirds does it taketo lift a house? I’ll bring my living,you wake your dead.We have nowhere to go, but we’re leaving anyhow,by many ways. When they ask whyyou want to fly, Blackbird? SayI want to leave the southbecause it killed the first man I lovedand so much more killing.Say my son’s name,his death was the first thing to break me inand fly me through town.If grief has a body it wears his Dodgers capand still walks to the corner store to buy lottery ticketsand Budweiser 40s.I don’t like what I have to be here to be.All the blackbirds with nowhere to gokeep leaving.
From Which I Flew
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- July 19, 2020
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Copyright © 2020 by Tyree Daye
from CARDINAL
Copper Canyon Press
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Beowulf Sheehan
Tyree Daye’s Cardinal is a generous atlas that serves as a poetic “Green Book”—the travel-cum-survival guide for black motorists negotiating racist America in the mid-twentieth century. Interspersed with images of Daye’s family and upbringing, which have been deliberately blurred, it also serves as an imperfect family album. Cardinal traces the South’s burdened interiors and the interiors of a black male protagonist attempting to navigate his many departures and returns home—a place that could both lovingly rear him and coolly annihilate him. With the language of elegy and praise, intoning regional dialect and a deliberately disruptive cadence, Daye carries the voices of ancestors and blues poets, while stretching the established zones of the Black American vernacular. In tones at once laden and magically transforming, he self-consciously plots his own Great Migration: “if you see me dancing a two step/I’m sending a starless code/we’re escaping everywhere.” These are poems to be read aloud. (Copper Canyon Press)
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