Until I can understand why you

Fled, why you are willing to bleed,

Why you deserve what I must be

Willing to cede, let me imagine

You are my mother in Montgomery,

Alabama, walking to campus

Rather than riding the bus. I know

What they call you, what they

Try to convince you you lack.

I know your ankles, the sudden

Thunder of your laugh. Until

I want to give you what I myself deserve,

Let me love you by loving her.

 

Your sister in a camp in Turkey,

Sixteen, deserving of everything:

Let her be my daughter, who has

Curled her neat hands into fists,

Insisting nothing is fair and I

Have never loved her. Naomi,

Lips set in a scowl, young heart

Ransacking its cell. Let me lend

Her passion to your sister, and

Love her for her living rage, her

Need for more, and now, and all.

Let me leap from sleep if her voice

Sounds out, afraid, from down the hall.

 

I have seen men like your father

Walking up Harrison Street

Now that the days are getting longer.

Let me love them as I love my own

Father, whom I phoned once

From a valley in my life

To say what I feared I’d never

Adequately said, voice choked,

Stalled, hearing the silence spread

Around us like weather. What

Would it cost me to say it now,

To a stranger’s father, walking home

To our separate lives together?

 

 

 

Tracy K. Smith is the current U.S. Poet Laureate, and the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor of the Humanities and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the Lewis Center for the Arts. She received the Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for her book of poetry Life on Mars. She attended Seeking Refuge: Faith-Based Approaches to Forced Migration and wrote this poem out of what she heard.