Tyehimba Jess
Tyehimba Jess Poems
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
...
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
...
My God is the living God,
God of the impertinent exile.
An outcast who carved me
into an outcast carved
...
Our Box Henry hid away.
John Berryman's Ol' Henry sulked.
I see his point—he was trying to put one over.
...
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
martha promise receives leadbelly, 1935
when your man comes home from prison,
when he comes back like the wound
and you are the stitch,
when he comes back with pennies in his pocket
and prayer fresh on his lips,
you got to wash him down first.
you got to have the wildweed and treebark boiled
and calmed, waiting for his skin like a shining baptism
back into what he was before gun barrels and bars
chewed their claim in his hide and spit him
stumbling backwards into screaming sunlight.
you got to scrub loose the jailtime fingersmears
from ashy skin, lather down the cuffmarks
from ankle and wrist, rinse solitary's stench loose
from his hair, scrape curse and confession
from the welted and the smooth,
the hard and the soft,
the furrowed and the lax.
you got to hold tight that shadrach's face
between your palms, take crease and lid
and lip and brow and rinse slow with river water,
and when he opens his eyes
you tell him calm and sure
how a woman birthed him
back whole again.
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9/20/2024 7:39:18 PM # 1.0.0.1119
