Dad Poem
       

A boy, I am told.
The familiar numbers fall
like a wall of ash across my mind,
the future now made
both freshly opaque
& terrifying in its clarity.
I know what I have
survived. I have lived
to tell of it only in songs
I can belt without ending
the world. But enough
of the untold terrors we know.
There is an entire genre
of poems about the fear
of bringing another
black son onto the Earth.
I refuse them all.
Little one, they are not ours
to bear. There is a war
outside, yes, and inside
our home there are books about flowers,
ten-speed bicycles, dinosaurs with names
you can't even pronounce yet.
We are building a story
for you that is bigger than bombs
or the words of assassins
who do not love us.
Your inheritance is this refusal
and infinitely more: Triceratopses, hyacinth,
racing uphill in our blue
helmets, two runaway ice comets
cracking the night air open,
so swift within
its shadow
we are almost invisible.

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Copyright © 2021 Joshua Bennett All rights reserved
from The Southern Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission