Concerned Citizen

When you proclaim to not see race

        despite a world
        licking its infected wounds
        overtly envisioned
        and widened
        deepened by the status-quo 
        our beauty bound and muted
        listless and silenced

        might you see rebirth
        lift us as something

        other than a threat?

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Written for NaPoWriMo Day 5 Prompt:

‘This prompt challenges you to find a poem, and then write a new poem that has the shape of the original, and in which every line starts with the first letter of the corresponding line in the original poem. If I used Roethke’s poem as my model, for example, the first line would start with “I,” the second line with “W,” and the third line with “A.” And I would try to make all my lines neither super-short nor overlong, but have about ten syllables. I would also have my poem take the form of four, seven-line stanzas. I have found this prompt particularly inspiring when I use a base poem that mixes long and short lines, or stanzas of different lengths. Any poem will do as a jumping-off point, but if you’re having trouble finding one, perhaps you might consider Mary Szybist’s “We Think We Do Not Have Medieval Eyes” or for something shorter, Natalie Shapero’s “Pennsylvania.”’

NaPoWriMo Day 5 Prompt

The poem I chose was “Harlem” by Langston Hughes, one of the greats.