These poems are published connected to the partnership between the Mid-Atlantic Review and Howard University and a recent event for the Howard community.

Wright is why I write

Richard Wright made Bigger Thomas
kill to know he had arrived.

Showed America
what happens when
blackness is twisted
beyond bending,
broken beyond
mending.

And then, he wrote the
most beautiful haikus before
he crossed over to the other side.

18 months, right before he died
he wrote in 5-7-5:

It was so silent
That the silence protested
With one lone bird cry
 

I’m not from, where I’m from

And when you find me there
I will not be there.

I’ll be in the curry goat and ginger tea
or oyster shells and cornmeal cakes
browning in the cast-iron.

You’ll have to turn the rocks over
and pull the roots up
you’ll need to follow the lengths

stretched beyond the first town,
past the insurance capital
down to the dirty riverbed
that holds native names
and the recent dead.

but I’m not there,
sometimes, I’m a glimmer
a reflection of the mother tongue
twisted in the current times,

a bright light that blind us
a blare of sound that mutes us
from what we’ve said
when all is wanted is a song,

a beat
a melody
that reminds us
of home

but what happens when home
was burnt down
the nape of the neck
with the permed-out curls of r’s
that dropped from the end of words
ciga’, lobsta’ and sista’

Cause history repeats like sounds
Of waves clashing with the shore,
Wind rattling windows
until it is rinsed and repeated
rinse and repeat
the cycle that displaced me
from where I’m from
cause, it’s not one place
not a place

not a single story
that runs through my veins
cause I bleed the names
of many places,
many faces
that all root back
to my memories—

of a place I’m not from
from a place I’m far from
places that lead back to me.

Summer Tate is a poet and educator focusing on American and African American Literature. She is published in Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, Here Poetry Journal, Eastern Connecticut State University, and Connecticut Literary Anthology, Woodhall Press. She teaches English in Hartford, Connecticut, and has been an adjunct professor at Springfield College, Fairfield University, and in the Second Chance Pell Program with Asnuntuck College. Summer holds a BA from Bay Path University and a Masters in English Education from UConn and received her MFA in Creative Writing from Fairfield University. She is an English PhD candidate at Howard University.

Featured image this post is “Portrait of Richard Wright”, MET DP-401-001, by Carl Van Vechten, license creative commons via Wikimedia Commons