A Sunday Poem

Memories

By tradition, Sunday’s a day for slowing down and reflecting. Has been since the Lord Himself took a break from six days of creating the universe. He’d earned it.

But that tradition is vanishing or gone altogether for many of us. People work on Sundays more than they used to (and I’m not sure that’s a good thing). Churchgoing has declined, along with traditional faith commitments (and I’m not sure that’s a good thing, either). And a lot of us are just too busy to take a breath, pause and find the different dimension of life that slower Sundays used to afford us.

In my family, Sundays often mean travel sports games and tournaments for the kids. But when we’re together for Sunday dinner—and we usually are—we’ll do family Bible study. God help my kids, I’m the teacher by default. And sometimes, I’ll read or recite a poem that seems apt, at least to me.

I’ve been reading poetry my whole life. It’s a practice that was both natural and expected in the big family I grew up in; there were ten of us kids, seven brothers and three sisters, all readers and writers and talkers, and a mother and father for whom poetry was a cornerstone of their lifelong romance, and of their aspirational parenting, too. Some of the happiest memories of my childhood are of me curled up on one side of my mom, my brother Greg on the other, as Mama read to us from Louis Untermeyer’s wonderful and once wildly popular anthology, pictured here. I can still hear her voice in the lines.

“Tyger, Tyger, burning bright, In the forest of the night…”

“I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three…”

“Shoot, if you must, this old gray head, But spare your country‘s flag,” she said.

Great stuff. And I was hooked for life.

Poetry, good poetry, has a singular power. It can make us less lonely, less isolated, as it raises within us a song that was made in the emotional depths and refined through the flashing nerve endings of another human being, the poet, and in that translation across the page from writer to reader we are granted a moment of solidarity with another soul. With all souls, even.

Anyway, I thought that Sundays might be a good day to share some poetry here from time to time. It’s Substack, right? We can make it anything we want.

So this is the opening section to what I think is one of the great poems of our time. It’s called “summer, somewhere,” and it’s by Danez Smith.

Smith is “a Black, Queer, Poz writer and performer from Saint Paul, Minnesota,” and they are the real deal. One of the most exciting talents in American poetry right now.

“summer, somewhere” is a long poem written in the wake of the killing of Trayvon Martin (and so many others), and it’s from the 2017 collection, “Don’t Call Us Dead.” Here’s how it begins:

somewhere, a sun. below, boys brown

as rye play the dozens & ball, jump 

in the air & stay there. boys become new

moons, gum-dark on all sides, beg bruise

-blue water to fly, at least tide, at least

spit back a father or two. i won’t get started.

history is what it is. it knows what it did.

bad dog. bad blood. bad day to be a boy

color of a July well spent. but here, not earth

not heaven, we can’t recall our white shirts

turned ruby gowns. here, there’s no language

for officer or law, no color to call white.

if snow fell, it’d fall black. please, don’t call

us dead, call us alive someplace better.

we say our own names when we pray.

we go out for sweets & come back.