The Poets Who Are Our Enemies
are not writing poems for beauty's sake. Their poems come in bottles from the sea to be put to our ears like conches. There are poems buried in the sands of prison yards, backyards, sequestered under stones, stone that was once the walls of a city, of a station, of a house, of a room in the heart of a house. Poems are torn from the hidden notebooks of poets in hiding. Poems are disguised as tails on long-stringed kites, are given to carrier pigeons disguised as more common birds. Some poems fall, or are thrown down. Wads like grout between cracked tile. The poets who are ours to battle may lose everything to pipes, to wire and glass, to objects simple enough to be found in a cabinet. These poets may die by fast talkers, by mistake, by gun, by bomb, and some by God by choice. The poets write to us of children and of strangers. They write with fingers in their ears to hear themselves think. Their poems are the only thing clear where little else is clear. The poems speak of a meal of lemons, of baskets in an alley, of leather, and of the sea. Always the sun- swallowing sea. The poets who are our enemies are not writing for a canon, their letters black as smoke filling an emptied square. They are writing for their lives. Some are dead already by the time their poems finally reach us. Their letters, bold as the cry of a dog heard over shells. Poems that speak plainly of a hand that seeks a hand, but, finding nothing, reaches still.
Vievee Francis, The Shared World (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2023)
