Poet’s Corner: “Rosa Parks” by Nikki Giovanni

by Mikaela Brewer ​for The 44 North

Senior Editor

“Rosa Parks” by Nikki Giovanni from Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea. Copyright © 2002 by Nikki Giovanni. Reprinted in Poetry by permission of Harper Collins Publishers Inc.

A white sign with black capital letters, held up at a protest.

Note: This poem is not in the public domain! Please use the link above to read it.

In 1971, Nikki Giovanni spoke with James Baldwin at length in A Dialogue (also released as a book). When I first read it, not long after she passed away in December 2024, the texture and resonance of her voice felt like double-sided sticky tape. It hasn’t left me, and sticks to what I read now. Her conviction is unparalleled not only in its power but in its grace; grace as in its dexterity of love. And for that reason alone, I struggled to choose just one poem for this essay. Nikki still calls us with wit, fervour, and care. 

“Rosa Parks” stands out in its dense, uniform block of text. It conforms, you might say, to the shape of a column in a newspaper, complete with narrative flow. But it certainly doesn’t conform in its content, which isn’t beneath complex diction or syntax, but under the literal act of reading the poem. So few of us read poems by Black women. It’s a great month to start. They’ve been writing the truth—of love and violence—for centuries, under persecution and censorship, sowing wisdom the way enslaved Black women, aboard ships crossing the Atlantic, hid seeds in their hair.

Nikki’s poem is also the shape of an elegy, ode, or brick—to be thrown or built with. It’s the shape of heaviness. The ghosts of Thurgood Marshall, Gwendolyn Brooks, Emmett Till, and the Pullman Porters are with us. And they remain alive, in part because women like Rosa Parks (and Claudette Colvin, Viola White, Pauli Murray, and Elizabeth Jennings Graham) sat back down on a bus, and kept what was always theirs. It wasn’t her feet that were tired when Rosa, the field secretary of the NAACP, reclaimed that seat—on the bus and elsewhere. It was hers, and everyone’s before her. Nikki’s poem reminds us of a few things: Rest is a human right, and yes, Black women are strong in innumerable ways, one of which is when they choose rest as resistance.  

“Rosa Parks” further connects modes of transportation through time, non-linearly, resisting the linear flow of news that frequently refuses the past’s life in the present. “And this is / for all the people who said Never Again” remains a call to action. It feels eerily applicable, and even at the time the poem was written (2002), could be a reference to wars on Palestine and Afghanistan, still raging today.

And in our role, as readers and distributors of Nikki Giovanni’s poetry, we can look to the Pullman Porters she writes of. 

“The Pullman Company established its sleeper cars as a unique and luxurious way to travel, complete with the [carefully trained, typically formerly enslaved Black men], hired to be porters. Pullman Porters quickly became a staple of the Pullman Sleeping Car experience, often fighting to maintain a balance between good relations with the Pullman company and protesting for better conditions and wages. Pullman Porters are often attributed to helping create a [B]lack middle class in the United States, with their employees forming the first all-[B]lack union, The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, in 1925.”

—Library of Congress

The Pullman Porters were the keepers of care and right to protest for their Black passengers. With this in mind, I admire the beckoning of a new manifesto, of sorts, with capitalization of ‘No’ in Nikki’s poem:

“No longer would / there be a reliance on the law; there was a higher law. When Mrs. / Parks brought that light of hers to expose the evil of the system, / the sun came and rested on her shoulders bringing the heat and / the light of truth. Others would follow Mrs. Parks. Four young / men in Greensboro, North Carolina, would also say No.”

“Rosa Parks” is an example of poetry as resistance, and therefore, as a commitment to storytelling in ongoing violence and its ever-unfolding aftermath. It’s a vow to truth-telling. And with that, because no one will ever say it better:

“But it was the / Pullman Porters who safely got Emmett to his granduncle and it / was Mrs. Rosa Parks who could not stand that death. And in not / being able to stand it. She sat back down.”

Poet’s Corner: “The Same City” by Terrance Hayes

by Mikaela Brewer ​for The 44 North

Senior Editor

“The Same City” by Terrance Hayes from Hip Logic. Copyright © by Terrance Hayes. Reprinted in Poetry with permission of Penguin Books, a division of The Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

A car in the rain at night

Note: This poem is not in the public domain! Please use the link above to read it.

Terrance Hayes is one of my favourite poets, with a long list of collections, awards, and fellowships which you can explore here. He is known to invent formal constraints and often writes on themes of music, masculinity, popular culture, and race. His breathtaking poem, “The Same City,” is no different. 

The first thing you might notice about it is the shape of the poem, much like falling snow or a rain-streaked windshield—especially in the cold. The lineation could also mimic tassels or something woven, drawing attention to the layering of time and relationships in the poem. We feel the movement, which Hayes mentions in this quote, via Poetry, originally from a 2013 interview with Lauren Russell for Hot Metal Bridge:

“I’m chasing a kind of language that can be unburdened by people’s expectations. I think music is the primary model—how close can you get this language to be like music and communicate feeling at the base level in the same way a composition with no words communicates meaning? It might be impossible. Language is always burdened by thought. I’m just trying to get it so it can be like feeling.”

The movement of water, juice, breath, cables, mouths, electricity, radiowaves, bodies, traffic, and light are musical to begin with, but Hayes illuminates this by braiding time in: the present moment’s, Noah’s, Joseph’s, his when he met his girlfriend, his father’s as a younger man, and the infant’s biological father’s. And all of this life shares space to say that he—we—exist within all of these times. A stunning example is in the first half of the poem, where we almost feel like the speaker could be the infant’s brother—that he’s longing to be a father through this lens: “I’d get out now, / prove I can stand with him / in the cold, but he told me to stay / with the infant.” 

And then, we burrow further into the soil of time by visiting Noah and Joseph, setting up the multi-generational rescuing that happens in the second stanza—“But to rescue a soul is as close / as anyone comes to God”—by beginning again. This is especially resonant of Noah’s story, after the flood. In the case of this poem, the rain is still falling, and the rescue is ongoing with tendrils in every time portal Hayes has opened (and left open). In other words, he’s writing about love. 

The complexity of love is further enacted through the breathtaking enjambment Hayes uses. These lines stop me every time: “There is one thing I will remember / all my life. It is as small / & holy as the mouth / of an infant. It is speechless.” Read each line individually, without the others. Hayes doesn’t tell us what the ‘one thing’ is, either. I read it as ‘love’ while knowing how intentionally he leaves himself and us speechless. It’s so profound it’s unnamable. And all we can do is hold each other—our smallness, sacredness, and innocence—in the cold.

Thinking about the holiday season and the onset of winter, this poem is a tender though strong reminder to remember who we are because of who is or has been for us. “In 1974, this man met my mother / for the first time as I cried or slept / in the same city that holds us / tonight. If you ever tell my story, / say that’s the year I was born.” Look at the enjambment again, and how it’s shifted to capture a clear love, honouring, and admiration for a father, even though I’m positive it wasn’t a perfect relationship. The holidays remind us that perfect relationships don’t exist. We continue to love, give, and carry grief regardless. Whose name(s), in your life, could you substitute into this poem, perhaps changing a few details here and there? We are all born when someone else is, whether blood-related or not. And to tell them we feel this is one of the greatest gifts we can give during the loneliest time of the year. 

Before you go, I wanted to share a few other poems that are in conversation with this one: “Perhaps the World Ends Here” by Joy Harjo, “A New Law” by Greg Delanty, “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden, and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost. Please read them—I hope they offer you a hand or a hug this winter. 

Poet’s Corner: “half-blood” by Justene Dion-Glowa

by Mikaela Brewer ​for The 44 North

Senior Editor

“half-blood” by Justene Dion-Glowa from The League of Canadian Poets’ Poetry Pause, June 5th, 2024

A bison in a wheat field under a cloudy sky

Note: This poem is not in the public domain! Please use the link above to read it.

Justene Dion-Glowa is a queer Métis poet living in Secwepemcúl’ecw. An alum of the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, they now work in the non-profit sector and recently released their first full-length poetry collection, Trailer Park Shakes, available now via Brick Books.

The brilliance of Justene Dion-Glowa’s poem shines through their use of white space on the page, which is one of my favourite craft tools in poetry. In “half-blood”, space—including caesuras, stanza breaks, line breaks, and indents, for example—works as hard as words, enacting the feeling of being ‘halved’ alongside a sort of sinister whiteness. But there is also space for thought, pause, breath, love, and reverence, for “the strength of our people / and Creator / reflecting in my eye shine”. The title of the poem, “half-blood”, isn’t extrapolated directly, but this is why it works so well: it layers the poem’s language. And although it likely speaks to Dion-Glowa’s Métis heritage, it also says: for so much to coexist is to be devastated—to be in a perpetual state of halving oneself and being halved by society. It’s both a brand of erasure and a necessary state of reflection.

Dion-Glowa, with tender care, also weaves in reflections on longing for the “sleek, hot, and slender-framed conventionally attractive”, “not made for a life of hardship”. A longing, now, to be halved. But I also think about the etymology of the word ‘hardship’, which conjures the rigidity of the British and French ships seemingly pouring into harbours, everything aboard inflicted like a trap. Dion-Glowa’s lines, here, gently shift blame and fault from them and their people. Followed by white space, I see these lines afloat, reclaiming the sea dominated by whiteness. 

There are also several short lines, intentionally placed to help us mirror feeling. For example, “spoons tapping along to the rhythm / I consider / how lucky I am / to have a weight I must carry physically” offers space to mirror how we consider gratitude, particularly with the inclusion of extra space beneath “how lucky I am”. Similarly, Dion-Glowa leaves extra space for generations to hurt—the past is not obsolete or ‘back in time’, it’s ongoing and always with us. The hurt didn’t happen behind us, it’s beneath our every step.

I’m also drawn to the musicality in “half-blood”, specifically in “girthy thighs”, “bison & bear”, and “food / fur / fibre / so / I starve no longer.” When rhyme and alliteration are used here, they ask us to chew. The language is delicious, so an excellent craft choice for the content of these lines (which become memorable for these reasons).

In the same vein as musicality, word choice profoundly shapes a poem. The word ‘meager’ stands out, starkly, because it’s the only word italicized. It also drives the last line, and is uncapitalized when we’d expect a capital ‘M’. We so often repeat “meager means” when we’re speaking about intentionally marginalized and “underprivileged” folks. By using lower case and italics, Dion-Glowa is tapping on the shoulder of the inflection—fear, discomfort, disgust—that’s used when we say ‘meager’, which our lexicon bolsters: “deficient in quantity, fullness, or extent; scanty, deficient in richness, fertility, or vigor; feeble, having little flesh; lean (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition).” Anti-fatness and ableism are apparent here without these exact words, reflective of the covert ways they outline our world. This is the power of poetry—‘meager’ is one word, and placed well, it does the work of evoking everything “half-blood” is alive on the page to say: in body, mind, spirit, and relationship, Dion-Glowa and their people are not, never have been, and never will be meager.