These poems are published here connected to the partnership between the Mid-Atlantic Review and Howard University and a recent event for the Howard community.
Mother’s Poems (For Lucille Clifton’s mother)
He threw her words
into dancing flames
watched them become
crinkled ash
charred her daydreams.
‘
He could not tame
the Phoenix he
would never know.
After the vote
A star fell last night
singed broken earth.
Blazed a crooked path
More will follow her.
I wish these warrior women
did not sing their songs
inside my bones.
Art Saves Our Lives
What is bottled up rages through our pens
splashes on canvas, chisels through rocks
that stand in our way as we stitch quilted
patterns to free ourselves from shackled
feet, from muzzles that try to shut our mouths
that we cut with Sonia’s razors between
our teeth so Nikki can ask:
Nigga can you kill? Can you kill nigga?
What we do for ourselves we do for daughters
daughter kind even when they don’t
listen; our art makes them pay attention
Outside validation is nice but not necessary.
We see us. We have always seen us
raising their babies, toiling in their kitchens,
scrubbing their floors, hiding our insides
holding our noses to not smell their lies.
We know without Lucy there would be no them
They still pissed off for being cast out of Akubu
Land. Banished to caucus mountains where they
sharpened their fangs to get back at us.
We know there is no way out of this matrix
without us as Oracle. Sophia saw it coming
She saw this world subsumed in invisible
webs, cyber threads able to wrap its cords
around our throats pop sockets out our eyes
a horror movie of our collective demise.
Warner’s Bro. tried to steal it. They
tried to walk off with all her stuff
she said give it back like a Shange poem.
Butler as seer wrote Parables to be sowed
showed us our end. This is why we ain’t
marching. The warnings were given.
They ain’t listen. Our magic cast a spell
so tough, they set themselves up to
become handmaidens in their own fairytale.
See, Toni reminded us Africans can fly
Pearl told us we were here before men
Tricia told us to Rest in Resistance.
We are storing up all energy in our pencils,
paints and clay to mold out a new path
a more productive way.
We gonna write quiet poems like Pinkie
Lane to sneak up on them; we gonna get
the sweet out the honey, scoop up
the flavor create new praise songs for our
survival with our own sound, do Dunham’s
Rara Tonga; Judith’s Cry all over their tremb-
ling tears without bending our knees
to see what they need.
Kimberly A. Collins MFA is a Poet, Callaloo Fellow, Pushcart finalist, and Master Instructor in Howard University’s First Year Writing and Poetry Program. She is the author of two books of poetry, Bessie’s Resurrection (Indolent Books 2018) and Slightly Off Center (1993) as well as a collection of essays Choose You Wednesday Wisdom to Wake Your Soul (2017). She is the founder of SOAR (So Others Ascend Righteously) where she empowers others through her writing for healing methods and programs. Her early work appeared in the seminal anthology edited by Ras Baraka and Kevin Powell, In the Tradition: An Anthology of Young Black Writers. Her most recent poetry appears in: It’s the Honey(2024) edited by Kwame Alexandar, The 100-year house (2022), Beltway Quarterly (2019), 50/50: Poems & Translations by Women over 50 (2018), Pittsburg Poetry Review, Revise the Psalm: The Gwendolyn Brooks, Anthology; Syracuse Cultural Workers’ 2017 Women Artist Datebook, Truth Feasting: Anthology of African American Writers (2016), The Berkeley Review and more. She is a native of Philadelphia who currently resides in Washington, D.C. Look for her at www.Kimberlyacollins.com.
Image: Comet Crash, Ben Crowder, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
