Tyehimba Jess

Tyehimba Jess Poems

My God is the living God,
God of the impertinent exile.
An outcast who carved me
into an outcast carved
...

Let me tell you how
white hands kilned me
in the moonless middle
...

We three warriors
were called forth
to be, forever, enemies.
...

When I got old enough
I asked my mother,
to her surprise,
...

Our Box Henry hid away.
John Berryman's Ol' Henry sulked.
I see his point—he was trying to put one over.
...

when your man comes home from prison,
when he comes back like the wound
and you are the stitch,
...

Did a slave song at a master's bidding
mark Tom while asleep in Charity's womb?
The whole plantation would be called to sing
...

Hear how sky opens its maw to swallow
Earth? To claim each blade and being and rock
with its spit? Become your own full sky. Own
...

I had no idea Tom would make me rich.
Blind and crazed, like a blessed up idiot,
he'd sing bluebird songs in perfect pitch,
...

Who am I to deny this world? This gift
of music storming through me? It howls out
my fingers when I reach into God's mouth
...

11.

the war speaks at night
with its lips of shredded children,
with its brow of plastique
...

My God is the living God,
God of the impertinent exile.
An outcast who carved me
...

mr. haney owned
shreveport 's general store
where a dollar a week
...

Tyehimba Jess Biography

Tyehimba Jess (born Detroit) is an American poet. He graduated from the University of Chicago, and New York University, with an MFA. He teaches poetry and fiction at CUNY College of Staten Island and is the faculty adviser for Caesura, the university's literary arts magazine. His work appeared in Soul Fires: Young Black Men on Love and Violence, Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora, Power Lines: Ten Years of Poetry from Chicago's Guild Complex, and Slam: The Art of Performance Poetry.)

The Best Poem Of Tyehimba Jess

Hagar In The Wilderness

Carved Marble. Edmonia Lewis, 1875

My God is the living God,
God of the impertinent exile.
An outcast who carved me
into an outcast carved
by sheer and stony will
to wander the desert
in search of deliverance
the way a mother hunts
for her wayward child.
God of each eye fixed to heaven,
God of the fallen water jug,
of all the hope a vessel holds
before spilling to barren sand.
God of flesh hewn from earth
and hammered beneath a will
immaculate with the power
to bear life from the lifeless
like a well in a wasteland.
I'm made in the image of a God
that knows flight but stays me
rock still to tell a story ancient as
slavery, old as the first time
hands clasped together for mercy
and parted to find only their own
salty blessing of sweat.
I have been touched by my God
in my creation, I've known her caress
of anointing callus across my face.
I know the lyric of her pulse
across these lips... and yes,
I've kissed the fingertips
of my dark and mortal God.
She has shown me the truth
behind each chiseled blow
that's carved me into this life,
the weight any woman might bear
to stretch her mouth toward her
one true God, her own
beaten, marble song.

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