Kwame Dawes is the author of twenty books of poetry and numerous other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. He has edited over a dozen anthologies. His most recent collection, City of Bones: A Testament (Northwestern University Press, 2017) appears along with Speak from Here to There (Peepal Tree Press, 2016), a co-written collection of verse with Australian poet John Kinsella, and A Bloom of Stones (Peepal Tree Press, 2016), a tri-lingual anthology of Haitian Poetry written after the earthquake, which he edited. A Spanish-language collection of his poems, titled Vuelo (Valaparaiso Ediciones), appeared in Mexico in 2016. He is Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and teaches at the University of Nebraska and the Pacific MFA Program. He is Director of the African Poetry Book Fund and Artistic Director of the Calabash International Literary Festival.
In Northern Ghana, a tribe,
small as such tribes go,
of soft-spoken farmers
and women who upturn
ancient proverbs to mark
the passage of time, to cast
new myths and legends
each passing generation;
they have learned to defy
death, eating the cooked
soft flesh of the ackee—
something that can kill(More …)
Math messes things up; this is
a problem of fate—the enemy
of the random, the egalitarian
paradise of home truths and
proverbs—math wrecks it
all. Rain, God says, falls
on the just and the unjust
alike, but the unjust usually
have umbrellas and math
pays attention to that stuff,
to the facts of it, like when
I say, “We are all having it
hard,” to ease my guilt; most
of that is a lie and it’s true,
the thing I am not saying
is that hard time is a language,(More …)
On the morning after the news,
like a nightmare,
a litany of tragedies, we will
call this the decade of grand
disappointments
and we will know who we are
by the accumulation of our silent
mourning, no one will
understand why we all wear
black, our women in black underthings,
their eyes shadowed with
regret, their bodies impatient,
their tongues sharper with resignation.
Only we will know how.(More …)