Poetry that restores agency.

The Morning News https://ift.tt/2YDsNiI

Poetry Magazine has a good overview of Lucille Clifton's career, "Lucille Clifton 101." It includes a poem we hadn't seen before, “jasper texas 1998,” that Clifton wrote in response to the murder of James Byrd by three white supremacists who dragged Byrd for three miles behind a car.

why and why and why
should i call a white man brother?
who is the human in this place,
the thing that is dragged or the dragger?
what does my daughter say?

One of the men who killed Byrd was the first white man to be sentenced to death for killing a Black person in the history of modern Texas.

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