Wake to find everything black
what was white, all the vice
versa—white maids on TV, black

sitcoms that star white dwarfs
cute as pearl buttons. Black Presidents,
Black Houses. White horse

candidates. All bleach burns
clothes black. Drive roads
white as you are, white songs

on the radio stolen by black bands
like secret pancake recipes, white back-up
singers, ball-players & boxers all

white as tar. Feathers on chickens
dark as everything, boiling in the pot
that called the kettle honky. Even

whites of the eye turn dark, pupils
clear & changing as a cat’s.
Is this what we’ve wanted

& waited for? to see snow
covering everything black
as Christmas, dark pages written

white upon? All our eclipses bright,
dark stars shooting across pale
sky, glowing like ash in fire, shower

every skin. Only money keeps
green, still grows & burns like grass
under dark daylight.

Kevin Young, “Negative” from To Repel Ghosts: The Remix. Copyright © 2005 by Kevin Young, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

 

I am no longer ashamed
how for weeks, after, I wanted
to be dead – not to die,

mind you, or do
myself in – but to be there
already, walking amongst

all those I’d lost, to join
the throng singing,
if that’s what there is –

or the nothing, the gnawing –
So be it. I wished
to be warm – & worn –

like the quilt my grandmother
must have made, one side
a patchwork of color –

blues, green like the underside
of a leaf – the other
an old pattern of the dolls

of the world, never cut out
but sewn whole – if the world
were Scotsmen & sailors

in traditional uniforms.
Mourning, I’ve learned, is just
a moment, many,

grief the long betrothal
beyond. Grief what
we wed, ringing us –

heirloom brought
from my father’s hot house –
the quilt heavy tonight

at the foot of my marriage bed,
its weight months of needling
& thread. Each straightish,

pale, uneven stitch
like the white hairs I earned
all that hollowed year – pull one

& ten more will come,
wearing white, to its funeral –
each a mourner, a winter,

gathering ash at my temple.