January 11, 2023

Kwame Dawes

THE SLEEP OF PROPHETS

The silent prophetess sleeps well at night,
for the pleasures of knowing are a kind
of peace. While one is bleeding bloody,
and an unfurled crowd turns into
a stream of blood, empty shells,
the graffiti of disaster, the plague
of bouquets and solemn regrets,
the prophetess is prepared for sorrow.
She has wept loudly in her cloister,
her fingers pulling at her unruly hair,
her face purged of all paint.
She is, she says to the burning city,
like a woman in love with an
unreachable heart. She carries
the sweetness of her pain deep,
and her body surrenders even as
it sorrows; so each night she
lays her head down, she sleeps
the deep untroubled sleep of knowing.
 

from Rattle #78, Winter 2022

__________

Kwame Dawes: “There seems to be a connection between being a consumer of music, literature, and so forth, and being a creator of it. For me, those two things seem to coincide. The mindset of the writer I can trace back to the mindset of wanting to control the narrative of my life, which never otherwise felt like something I could control.” (web)

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November 4, 2019

Kwame Dawes

SORROW

In sooth, I know not why I am so sad,
It wearies me, you say it wearies you.
But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
What stuff tis made of, whereof it is born
I am to learn.
—The Tempest: Act 1, Sc 1

It is low grade and so unremarkable
this sorrow—it comes like indigestion
or shortness of breath and all the
worries of these signs of weakness,
no one need know. Of course sorrow
is too much of a word—such a fat
word filled with the bitter aftertaste
of tepid coffee left on a café stool,
the pink of a woman’s lipstick on
its edge, leaves all around and a 
heavy chill over all things—sorrow
is the death of beautiful things,
it is black cashmere and black
corduroys faintly smelling of old
food and days of sweat and neglect;
sorrow is the pretension of Mozart’s
Requiem seeping under the door of
the lonely man; always lamenting
what he has lost—no, sorrow is
the woman I met in Ganthier
staring blankly into the cane fields,
her feet dusty, her skirt stained, 
her breath heavy with hunger;
she has nothing left—the litany
of her losses so epic, one cannot
repeat them in a poem, her sorrow
without tears, that is something.
Mine is merely the kind without
trauma; the insipid persistence
of regret, or perhaps the feeling
that happiness is the prelude
to tragedy. I should have learned
to drink, but instead I have
learned to chuckle ironically,
find quiet in the way things are.
Did you know I have an ankle
that sends sharp pains up my body
every few steps I take, every day 
of my life?

from Rattle #65, Fall 2019
Tribute to African Poets

__________

Kwame Dawes: “There seems to be a connection between being a consumer of music, literature, and so forth, and being a creator of it. For me, those two things seem to coincide. The mindset of the writer I can trace back to the mindset of wanting to control the narrative of my life, which never otherwise felt like something I could control.” (web)

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December 17, 2013

Kwame Dawes

ROPE

To hold our lives together on the cart
before the slow march after midnight
along back-roads, blind-driving, the scent
of the exhaust making us drowsy, every
shadow in the fields a threat of sorts;
we use rope thick as two thumbs side by side,
pulling hard on the knot to keep our
parts from falling by the wayside. We
have kept this rope supple with oil,
constant use, never letting it stay
idle long enough to rot. It is hard
to look at the coiled silence of our
strongest rope and not think of what
it has held: the heavy grey-green
battered bucket knocking the stone
sides of the wall, top water spilling
back down, this cherished substance,
carrying our lives; the mare, white
and grey, plodding across the wide
open field at dusk, her head heavy
with labor, the rope a caress
against her neck, the way she
turns towards a gentle tug, we
hold the balance of our need
in thin rope; the dead weight
of Junebug at dawn, his skin still
steaming, his beautiful black skin
catching the morning light, tender
among the leaves, how we found him
there, his neck stretched, the wrapping
of several yards of taut rope
around the drooping branch; where
we found it, how we undid the knot,
let his body down into our
arms then carried it like a soldier’s
flag, bearing it behind the cart
shaking along with his swollen body.
This ordinary rope, this gift
we cannot forget, this remembrance
of what we have lost. Someday,
a soul will come out of the fields
to claim it, and then we will know.

from Rattle #40, Summer 2013

__________

Kwame Dawes is Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and Chancellor’s Professor at the University of Nebraska.

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