American poet Danez Smith wearing on his back a poem by Angel Naifs
little prayer Let ruin end here let him find honey where there once was a slaughter let him enter the lion's cage & find a field of lilacs and let this be the healing & if not let it be
Danez Smith from Don’t Call Us Dead, Graywolf Press, 2017
A searing new voice in American poetry, Danez Smith is one of a pack of young American poets riding in from the fringes, writing a poetry of resistance, celebration of difference and of horrifying lament. Lament that comes from lives born far from Western culture’s comfortable center.
Like smelling salts, this startling and disturbing poetry crys wake up, wake up. And his cries join others, those of Ocean Vuong, sam sax and Jamal May, to name a few.
Smith’s little poem from his latest collection, Don’t Call Us Dead, a finalist for the prestigious National Book Award in 2017, strikes me as an outlier. A poem different in tone and intensity from many in his book. It’s what made it standout for me. The tone, is it exhaustion I hear in the the poem’s opening plea: let ruin end here? The bigness of such a small word: ruin.
American poet Danez Smith reading Dear White America on U Tube
So much in this huge small poem. A biblical plea for the lion to lie down with the lamb. For places of conflict and war to become places of sweetness, beauty and healing.
But unlike some of the pleading voices in the bible and, in particular, in the Psalms, there is no querulous demanding tone. It’s a a quiet request and, for me, ends with shocking acceptance. and if not let it be.
Part of me wants to yell back: are you kidding? Let it be: in Syria? Myanmar? Sudan? Eastern Congo? A school in Florida? A church in Florida? A mosque in Quebec? Are you kidding?
But no, he’s not kidding. He can’t change the world’s violence but he can try and change its impact on his heart. His response. He can want it. Work for it. And then accept what is.
This prayer does not have the tone nor the cry calling out a racist America in his poem, Dear White America. Nor the rage in the poem You’re Dead America. These acid cries:
tomorrow, i’ll have hope. tomorrow i can shift the wreckage & find a seed. i don’t know what will grow i’ve lost my faith in this garden the bees are dying the water poisons whole cities but my honeyed kin those brown folks who make up the nation of my heart only allegiance I stand for realer than any god for them i bury whatever this country thought it was.
These his necessary outcries. There in its own way a prayer against God.But prayer, this huge little prayer, so big in its quiet, seems to be a way of staying sane (let it be) when the horrors refuse to change. He asks it be his way. I ask let it be my way, too.