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Two Poems

By Joshua BennettMay 27, 2018

Two Poems

 









These poems appear in the LARB Print Quarterly Journal: No. 18,  Genius

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THE NEXT BLACK NATIONAL ANTHEM


Will naturally begin

with a blues note.

 

Some well-adorned

lovelorn lyric

 

about how

your baby left

 

& all you got

in the divorce

 

was remorse.

& a mortgage.

 

& a somewhat

morbid, though

 

mostly metaphorical,

obsession with

 

the underground.

How it feels to live

 

in such unrelenting emptiness,

unseen, altogether un-correctable

 

by the State’s endless arms.

Just imagine: Ellison’s Prologue

 

set to the most elaborate

Metro Boomin instrumental

 

you can fathom, brass

horns & pulsar cannons

 

firing off in tandem

as Aretha lines a hymn

 

in the footnotes. Twelve &

a half minutes of unchecked,

 

bass-laden braggadocio.

The most imitated,

 

incarcerated human

beings in the history




 


of the world & every nanosecond

of the band’s boundless

 

song belongs to us.

It is ours, the way

 

the word overcome

or The Wiz or Herman

 

Melville is ours. In any corner

store or court of law, any

 

barbershop argument

or hours-long spat

 

over Spades. The Next Black

National Anthem will,

 

by the rule, begin

in blood, & span

 

our ongoing war against

oblivion. Clarify the anguish

 

at the core of our gentleness.

How even that generosity

 

is a kind of weapon.

This music, our blade

 

-d criticism of a country

obsessed with owning

 

everything that shimmers,

or moves with a destination

 

in mind. Even the sky.

Even the darkness

 

behind our eyes

when we dream.

 


¤



 




TOKEN COMES CLEAN


What I desired most was approachlessness,

enough fear to mark a sharp & ardent

 

wall between me & the broader social

sphere, think: semi-invisible

 

force-field, think: aura light

umber like Bruce Leroy.

 

A beauty one might use to keep

a state-sanctioned grave

 

at bay, the distance

this darker body ought

 

to buy but doesn’t.

If evolution were kind,

 

we would all be fireproof

by now. A shame, to be sure: this

 

brutal truth boomeranging back

& forth across America’s oeuvre,

 

History stammering with blood

in its throat, blood on the books, blood

 

on the leaves & what can you right

-fully call living now that the dead

 

have learned to dance so well?

Knife wounds in the global sky,

 

White god on my childhood mind

& you want to talk about repair






 

¤

 





LARB Contributor

Dr. Joshua Bennett hails from Yonkers, NY. He is the author of The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016) and Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man, which is forthcoming from Harvard University Press. Bennett holds a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University, and an M.A. in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Warwick, where he was a Marshall Scholar. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Poetry and elsewhere. He is currently a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University.

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