The President Has Never Said the Word ‘Black’ |
The President Has Never Said the Word ‘Black’
Poem selected by Matthew Zapruder
The New York Times Magazine
2016-09-30
This poem’s expressions of feeling about the blackness of the president disquiet, trouble and inform. Its tones shift among mockery, sympathy, cynicism, anger and mourning. Here, a young African-American poet is addressing the explosive subject of race, so often reduced to platitudes in our public discourse, employing a vital complexity that might be possible to achieve only in poetry.
To the extent that one begins
to wonder if he is broken.
It is not so difficult to open
teeth and brass taxes.
The president is all like
five on the bleep hand side…
Read the entire poem here.
Tags: Matthew Zapruder, Morgan Parker, New York Times, New York Times Magazine, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine