Poem of the Week, by Langston Hughes
I’ve sat in silent, exhausted rage around dinner tables listening to men and women argue about rape and which factors that lead up to it are under a woman’s control. Sometimes I leave the room and go into the kitchen to bang my head against a hot stove, because that feels better than listening to good men, many of whom I like and respect, explain with care and patience how women shouldn’t get so drunk, especially late at night, how they shouldn’t walk alone, shouldn’t wear certain outfits, that it just is not safe, how they wish so much the world wasn’t like that for women, but it is. What a revelation, I think, thanks for solving that whole rape thing.
We have a rape problem because men rape women. That’s where the conversation begins. How do you change a culture in which, at such a deep level that it’s nearly invisible, there is a belief that women are prey + men can’t control their sex drive = rape? You start by pointing it out. By talking. And with recognizing that men have to change that culture.
That right there is as close as I can come to even beginning to imagine what it’s like to be black in my country. And the way to start changing a culture in which racism is so systemic that it’s barely noticeable to white people is for white people to point it out to each other, to have those hard conversations. It is not the responsibility of black people. This is on white people.
Yesterday I walked past a little free library. The first book I saw in it was The Poetry of Our World, which I took with me. In it, as a bookmark, was a quarter-folded sheet of paper with poems by Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks. If I were a superstitious person who looked to the universe for signs, I would have taken that as a sign that one of those poems should be the poem of the week. I’m not that kind of person, but Mr. Hughes, I see how beautiful you are, and I am ashamed.
I, too, sing America
– Langston Hughes
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
when company comes,
but I laugh,
and eat well,
and grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
when company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
then.
Besides, they’ll see how beautiful
I am
and be ashamed–
I, too, am America.
For more information on Langston Hughes, please click here.
here was anything beyond this world, and that my grandmother –his mother– had told me near the end of her life that she believed in a heaven where my grandfather, and her parents, and her sister and her friends would all be waiting for her when she got there. My father laughed and said he didn’t know about that, but that he did believe there was some kind of force in the universe, beyond his power to grasp. When I was a child my father was a force in my universe. He was a giant man with giant physical strength, the kind of man who would pour Clorox on a bleeding wound to disinfect it and avoid a doctor visit. This poem, by Robert Hayden, always comes to mind on Father’s Day. I first read it as a child and didn’t understand it. But I do now.
When it comes time to leave this world? That one perfect cup of coffee in the morning. The snap of the cards being shuffled for another game of rummy late at night at a bar. The red shirt I always wore on Saturday nights at the Alibi. The look on my toddler’s face that day he bent over laughing at the ferns unfurling in the back yard because to him they looked like dragons. The scarred brown heft of the chunk of wood I bought at a garage sale and use as a cutting board. These are the things that come to mind, when I think about what I’ll most miss.
“Live every day like it’s your last because someday you’re going to be right.”
Every morning, soon as I wake up, I make a list of things to do that day. As the day goes on, things get crossed off, until night comes, at which point I turn into a pumpkin and can do no more. Whatever wasn’t done on that day’s list goes onto tomorrow’s list. Once in a great while –like once a year or so– the end of the afternoon approaches and it looks as if everything on the list might actually get crossed off. This is a terrifying thought –what would happen if there were nothing left on the list?– so I quickly add a couple more things. To leave this world without having done it all, I guess that’s the only thing that feels right to me. So you can see why I love this poem.
I wrote this poem seventeen years ago, after watching one of my daughters standing on a stool at the kitchen sink. A few things have changed in those years: that daughter and her brother and sister have grown up, I’m happy with blonde hair and I’d settle for an eight-minute mile. But everything else still holds. My bargain with the planets remains the same.
Alison McGhee 