The Poets Who Are Our Enemies by Vievee Francis

The Poets Who Are Our Enemies
Vievee Francis

are not writing poems for beauty’s sake.
Their poems come in bottles from the sea
to be put to our ears like conches.
There are poems buried in the sands
of prison yards, backyards, sequestered
under stones, stone that was once the walls
of a city, of a station, of a house, of a room in the heart
of a house.
                 Poems are torn from the hidden notebooks
of poets in hiding. Poems are disguised
as tails on long-stringed kites, are given to carrier
pigeons disguised as more common birds.
Some poems fall, or are thrown down. Wads
like grout between cracked tile.
                                              The poets who are ours
to battle may lose everything to pipes, to wire and glass,
to objects simple enough to be found in a cabinet.
These poets may die by fast talkers, by mistake, by gun, by bomb,
and some by God by choice. The poets write to us
of children and of strangers. They write
with fingers in their ears to hear themselves think.
Their poems are the only thing clear where little else is
clear. The poems speak of a meal of lemons, of baskets
in an alley, of leather, and of the sea. Always the sun-
swallowing sea.
                              The poets who are our enemies are not writing
for a canon, their letters black as smoke
filling an emptied square. They are writing for their lives.
Some are dead already
by the time their poems finally reach us.
Their letters, bold as the cry of a dog heard over shells.
Poems that speak plainly of a hand that seeks
a hand, but, finding nothing, reaches still.

SELECTED BY EUGENIA LEIGH

“The Poets Who Are Our Enemies” appears in Vievee Francis’s The Shared World, whose title comes from Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem, “Gate A-4.” I’ve shared this poem widely, from classrooms to stages, since October 2023.

In the United States, many of us seem to take turns being “the enemy,” though there are those whom this country has always dehumanized and targeted this way. Francis’s poem resounds with urgency. Pay attention, she insists, to these “enemy” poets. The poets for whom “poetry is not,” as Audre Lorde wrote, “a luxury.” The poets who write to live. Who write in places where poems are a threat to those in power.

The line about poems “disguised / as tails on long-stringed kites” immediately brings to mind one such poet, activist, and martyr from the current genocide in Gaza: Refaat Alareer, and his poem, “If I Must Die.”

ABOUT EUGENIA LEIGH

Eugenia Leigh is a Korean American poet and the author of Bianca (Four Way Books, 2023) and Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (Four Way Books, 2014). Eugenia serves as a Poetry Editor at The Adroit Journal.