A Poem For Sunday

“The Lucky One” by Reginald Shepherd:

The middle-aged white man in a beat-up blue Pinto

who shouts “Hey man, what’s up?”, pulls up onto

the curb in front of me to ask the time, because

I am a young black man and who knows what he wants

from me: or my dream in which nothing works, not even the lights,

because it’s France under the Occupation, and Billie Holiday

sings “I Cried for You” with blue hair on the television

while men in drag fan-dance behind her and young people

grind together in Technicolor on the studio dance floor (when the camera

isn’t closing on her pancaked face, her one

gardenia pinned back like blue-rinsed hair), because the Nazis

still allow it and pleasure is such a pretty thing

to watch, and I am hiding in this house with air-conditioning, waiting

for the owners, whom I haven’t met, to come home, the lights

to come back on, waking up afraid (just after

they return, turn off a dead black woman’s tears)

in the second half of the twentieth century not knowing

the time of day, speaking French to myself, singing.

(From Some Are Drowning by Reginald Shepherd © 1995 Reginald Shepherd. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press. Video of Camille Rankine reading Reginald Shepherd at a Poetry Society of America event, “Yet Do I Marvel: Iconic Black Poets of the 20th Century“)