Until further notice Poetry Daily will devote Wednesdays to What Keeps Us, an impromptu series featuring poems that sustain and uplift through trying times. We thank you for reading and hope that you will share poems with your friends and neighbors. Please be well.
"Nichols spent her first eight years in the coastal village of Stanleyville, and it seems to be this smaller child we meet in the sea-washed imagery of the poem. Her opening stanza acknowledges the imaginary nature of the encounter: the speaker is not imagining a magic-realist meeting with her child self, but 'the ghost / of my childhood.'"
Resources for Supporting and Uplifting the Black Community
Black Girl Magik: "Black Girl Magik is a global movement creating safe spaces for Black women and girls (both gen-z and millenials) to voice, listen and encourage each other with unconditional vulnerability and honest acceptance."
TheRacial Equity Institute:"We are an alliance of trainers, organizers, and institutional leaders who have devoted ourselves to the work of creating racially equitable organizations and systems. We help individuals and organizations develop tools to challenge patterns of power and grow equity."
Talking About Race:"The National Museum of African American History & Culture provides tools and guidance for talking and learning about race and racism, including issues of bias, whiteness, and the historical foundations of race."
Poetry Daily stands with the Black community. We oppose racism, oppression, and police brutality. We will continue to amplify diverse voices in the poetry world. Black Lives Matter.
"As visitors approach the sculpture, the vibration of their feet on the gallery floor, their movements, even their breathing, lead to the slow crumbling and collapse of the work itself. The figure takes on a sense of the sublime and of the divine not so much from its scale, but from its impermanence. Its object-hood, its this-ness, is at every moment in the process of disintegration."
