Glory

Glory of plums, femur of Glory.
Glory of ferns
on a dark platter.

Glory of willows, Glory of Stag beetles
Glory of the long obedience
of the kingfisher.

Glory of waterbirds, Glory
of thirst. 

Glory of the Latin
of the dead and their grammar
composed entirely of decay. 

Glory of the eyes of my father
which, when he died, closed
inside his grave,

and opened even more brightly
inside me.

Glory of dark horses
running furiously
inside their own

dark horses.

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“In this atmosphere of daily proximity to annihilation, I find myself desperately missing my friends. Their faces have been coming to me, especially the face of my friend, B. The visual softness of his face, his full head of hair that spills sideways, his face is a shadow archive. His face made me think of my father’s face, a face which contained almost in equal measure, praise and mournfulness. I wanted to write a poem that was the metric measure of that face. To praise, as my father’s face did, living; and in his death, the opposite of living. Praise as elation, praise as desolation. I picked my pen, I began to write.”
—Gbenga Adesina

Black Lives Matter Anthology

“But history is no sieve & sanity is no elixir”

—“When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving” by Reginald Dwayne Betts

Thanks to Major Jackson, author of The Absurd Man (W.W. Norton, 2020), who curated Poem-a-Day for June 22-July 3. Read a Q&A about Jackson’s curatorial approach and find out more about our guest editors for the year.