Don't Call Us Dead: Poems

by Danez Smith

paradise is a world where everything is sanctuary & nothing is a gun.

i spent my life arguing how i mattered until it didn’t matter.

i was raised with a healthy fear of the dark. i turned the light bright, but you just kept being born, kept coming for me, kept being so dark, i got sca … i was doing my job.

i’m sick of calling your recklessness the law.

because black boys can always be too loud to live.

how much time do you want for your progress? i’ve left Earth to find a place where my kin can be safe, where black people ain’t but people the same color as the good, wet earth, until that means something, until then i bid you well, i bid you war, i bid you our lives to gamble with no more.

if no one has told you, you are beautiful & lovable & black & enough & so—you pretty you—am i.

if love is a room of broken glass, leave me to dance until my feet are memory.

do you expect me to dance when every day someone who looks like everyone i love is in a gun fight armed with skin?

& he will say tonight, i want to take you how the police do, unarmed & sudden.

let ruin end here let him find honey where there was once a slaughter