Between Babylon
and the sea, I’ve built a home
with the sea’s whispers.
Copyright © 2024 by Geoffrey Philp. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 5, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
Between Babylon
and the sea, I’ve built a home
with the sea’s whispers.
Copyright © 2024 by Geoffrey Philp. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 5, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
One does such work as one will not,
And well each knows the right;
Though the white storm howls, or the sun is hot,
The black must serve the white.
And it’s, oh, for the white man’s softening flesh,
While the black man’s muscles grow!
Well I know which grows the mightier,
O, rich young lord, thou ridest by
With looks of high disdain;
It chafes me not thy title high,
Thy blood of oldest strain.
The lady riding at thy side
Is but in name thy promised bride.
Ride on, young lord, ride on!
I’m in my room writing
speaking in myself
& I hear you
move down the hallway
to water your plants
I write truth on the page
I strike the word over & over
yet I worry you’ll pour too much water on the plants
& the water will overflow onto the books
ruining them
If I can’t speak out of myself
how can I tell you I don’t care about the plants?
how can I tell you I don’t care if the books get wet?
I have folded my sorrows into the mantle of summer night,
Assigning each brief storm its allotted space in time,
Quietly pursuing catastrophic histories buried in my eyes.
And yes, the world is not some unplayed Cosmic Game,
And the sun is still ninety-three million miles from me,
And in the imaginary forest, the shingled hippo becomes the gray unicorn.
No, my traffic is not with addled keepers of yesterday’s disasters,
Seekers of manifest disembowelment on shafts of yesterday’s pains.
Danez Smith is the author of Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017) and [insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014).
Jackie Wang is the author of the poetry collection The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void (Nightboat, 2021), which was longlisted for the National Book Award.
Janice Mirikitani was born on February 4, 1941, in Stockton, California.
Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017).
Meg Day grew up in California’s Bay Area and received a BA from the University of California, San Diego, an MFA from Mills College, and a PhD from
Learn more about the 2023 Poet Laureate Fellows, their communities, fellowship projects, writing practices, and thoughts on poetry, by reading these interviews and essays from their fellowship year.
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