Poem: American Income

Poem: American Income

The New York Times – by Afaa Michael Weaver and Reginald Dwayne Betts

Some days you feel like this. Maybe after watching the news that George Floyd was killed. Remembering that Eric Garner, too, could not breathe on an American street, under the hold of American police. And you wonder what poetry says to any of this. Afaa Michael Weaver’s “American Income” is a kind of answer. A noticing of it all, how sometimes it feels that your suffering is the path to someone else’s enlightenment, how sometimes, under the weight of it all, you fail where you would rather love. Or, as Weaver says of Black men, sometimes we keep “the weeping heads of gods in their eyes.”

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