The poet presents his latest collection out from W.W. Norton & Company, When I Waked, I Cried To Dream Again, a dynamic, moving hybrid work that celebrates Black youth, often too fleeting and examines Black lives lost to police violence.
A. Van Jordan
In When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again — a volume of poems and lyric prose, Whiting Award–winner A. Van Jordan draws comparisons to Black characters in Shakespearean plays—Caliban and Sycorax from The Tempest, Aaron the Moor from Titus Andronicus and the eponymous antihero of Othello—to mourn the deaths of Black people, particularly Black children, at the hands of police officers. What do these characters, and the ways they are defined by the white figures who surround them, have in common with Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin and other Black people killed in the twenty-first century?
The Tailor
You’ve come to me and asked for a dream.
Something you’ve seen in a magazine you now
want me to make into a reality, to sew,
in effect, a new reality for you. You pay me a visit,
but this is really home for you; yet, like a stranger
you ask for a way to fit in. Well, lucky for you, style
is my business. I can make anything I can see; style
is at home wherever you find it. It’s more than a dream;
it’s a way to speak to the world, like a stranger
making a new friend. Before you were an outsider; now,
with a new suit or dress, it’s as if you’re revisiting
a familiar place. You tell me what you want, and I’ll sew.
Your part in this is easy. Don’t think so
hard about clothes; think about you. Style
must be worn more than the fabric itself. Visit
the possibilities in the pages of Vogue and dream
into my fingers. Don’t hesitate in this life; now
is the time to tell the onlookers to cease being strangers.
Welcome them to you with new clothes.
Don’t feel strange about standing out. Just allow me to sew
the world around your bones in the here and the now
and let history fall at your well-heeled feet. A new style
is always welcomed despite how it bangs against dreams
of uniforms and boots in step, the guns visiting
our homes at night. They want us pinned inside, not to visit
the rest of this world. A new cut to an old suit? Strange
to some, but most will come to appreciate your dream
and will come to me in time, at night, and ask me to sew
their lives into lines that speak peace. A new style
walks. As politicians ask us to wait, we demand Now—
for the freedom to express with our bodies. Now,
don’t get me wrong. Clothes only protect flesh; a visit
to a tailor is like going to church.
Spirit, always in style, worships through what one wears. How strange
this world would be if we were all in uniform, sad to sew
a garment for someone who wasn’t allowed to dream.
Now, go forth in the alluring clothes of the stranger,
and visit others as if a needle and thread sewed
not just a new style into this world but also a new dream.
HEX
The day of the spell was the day of cast shadows,
of diaphanous figures whipped clean of fear,
angels ablaze sailing a coastline of hushed tête-à-têtes,
adagio tenor wails laced with rage, smoke rising
from the wails, from the laughter; just when
the last local trains crawled into stations;
just when televisions grew verdigris in homes, obsolete
from indolence; just when Black signatories erased
their names and put on their boots, cirrus streaks formed
on the skyline of the city. A mother held her
barely alive son, the son to whom she vowed
protection from harm. Having thrown a circle
of goofer dust to enclose her enemies, she raises
a totem over her head. It’s now time: Let her wield
the words of Black declensions, new vowels,
the best nouns of home training, of damn good sense.
Let her sit for a spell, wipe sleep from her eye.
Let her obtain a license for what’s lethal
from whatever God has taken her image,
whenever the sun comes over the buildings,
whenever the moon weighs more than the sun,
more than Pisces and Neptune. Walk to
a street corner with plenty of witnesses,
where you’ll bear no isolation,
sing your words facing North or even higher.
Now, walk backward through the chains
of time from each past and current hindrance
to our future. Invoke the names of those
not ceding privilege in boardrooms, the ones who oppress
to their graves. Now summon each forgotten spirit,
each fallen son. Bless each prayed-up grandmother,
each open door and vivid corridor. Bless the pains
spared you, vicarious to you, passed down in your blood,
carrying you through the dangers and the echoes of time.
Remember: family echoes within your body; history
pulls through you as you move through a day.
Raise them in this… prayer, let’s call it,
to that God who took your image.
Go to the tree, to the home, to the street corner,
and spread these words–tossing wreaths,
spinning incantations–where torn
life collapsed under a last breath.
