Yusef Komunyakaa Poems

At six, she chewed off
The seven porcelain buttons
From her sister's christening gown
& hid them in a Prince Albert can

On a sill crisscrossing the house
In the spidery crawlspace.
She'd weigh a peach in her hands
Till it rotted. At sixteen,

She gazed at her little brother's
Junebugs pinned to a sheet of cork,
Assaying their glimmer, till she
Buried them beneath a fig tree's wide,

Green skirt. Now, twenty-six,
Locked in the beauty of her bones,
She counts eight engagement rings
At least twelve times each day.
...

Her eyelids were painted blue.
When she closed her eyes the sea
rolled in like ten thousand fiery chariots,
...

Beauty, I've seen you
pressed hard against the windowpane.
But the ugliness was unsolved
...

When the trees were guilty, hugged up
to history & locked in a cross-brace
with Whitman's Louisiana live oak,
...

In the day's mirror
you see a tall black man.
Fingers of gold cattail
...

The river stones are listening
because we have something to say.
The trees lean closer today.
...

Using the gun mounts
for monkey bars,
children skin the cat,
...

He danced with tall grass
for a moment, like he was swaying
with a woman. Our gun barrels
...

In a cerulean ruckus
Of quilts, we played house
Off the big room where
...

We can cut out Nemesis's tongue
By omission or simple analysis.
Doesn't this sin have to marry
Another, like a wishbone

Worked into meat, to grow
Deadly? Snared within
The blood's quick night,
Our old gods made sex

& wit, of nitrate & titanium,
Hurl midnight thunderbolts
& lightning. Are we here
Because they must question

Every death in an alley,
Every meltdown? We know
We wouldn't be much, if thorns
Didn't drive light into wet blooms.
...