By Yusef Komunyakaa
The city at 3 a.m. is an ungodly mask
the approaching day hides behind
& from, the coyote nosing forth,
the muscles of something ahead,
& a fiery blaze of eighteen-wheelers
zoom out of the curved night trees,
along the rim of absolute chance.
A question hangs in the oily air.
She knows he will follow her scent
left in the poisoned grass & buzz
of chainsaws, if he can unweave
a circle of traps around the subdivision.
For a breathy moment, she stops
on the world’s edge, & then quick as that
masters the stars & again slips the noose
& darts straight between sedans & SUVs.
Don’t try to hide from her kind of blues
or the dead nomads who walked trails
now paved by wanderlust, an epoch
somewhere between tamed & wild.
If it were Monday instead of Sunday
the outcome may be different,
but she’s now in Central Park
searching for a Seneca village
among painted stones & shrubs,
where she’s never been, & lucky
she hasn’t forgotten how to jig
& kill her way home.
Source: Poetry (December 2015)
Poet Bio
More By This Poet
Dead Reckoning III
They work fingers to bone & borrow
smudged paper, then make promises
to family, unmerciful gods, the unborn.
Some eat a favorite meal three times
in a row. Others partake only a pinch
of soil before boarding half-broken boats
& rubber rafts — half of the young women
big...
Rock Me, Mercy
The river stones are listening
because we have something to say.
The trees lean closer today.
The singing in the electrical woods
has gone dumb. It looks like rain
because it is too warm to snow.
Guardian angels, wherever you're hiding,
we know you can't be everywhere...
More Poems about Living
Meanwhile
From the Sky
When I die,
bury me in the sky—
no one is fighting over it.
Children are playing soccer
with empty bomb shells
(from the sky I can see them).
A grandmother is baking
her Eid makroota and mamoul
(from the sky I can taste them).
Teens are writing love...
More Poems about Nature
Listening in Deep Space
We've always been out looking for answers,
telling stories about ourselves,
searching for connection, choosing
to send out Stravinsky and whale song,
which, in translation, might very well be
our undoing instead of a welcome.
We launch satellites, probes, telescopes
unfolding like origami, navigating
geomagnetic storms, major disruptions.
Rovers...
At the Equinox
The tide ebbs and reveals orange and purple sea stars.
I have no theory of radiance,
but after rain evaporates
off pine needles, the needles glisten.
In the courtyard, we spot the rising shell of a moon,
and,...
More Poems about Social Commentaries
From the Sky
When I die,
bury me in the sky—
no one is fighting over it.
Children are playing soccer
with empty bomb shells
(from the sky I can see them).
A grandmother is baking
her Eid makroota and mamoul
(from the sky I can taste them).
Teens are writing love...
Poem with Human Intelligence
This century is younger than me.
It dresses itself
in an overlong coat of Enlightenment thinking
despite the disappearing winter.
It twirls the light-up fidget spinner
won from the carnival of oil economies.
In this century, chatbots write poems
where starlings wander from their murmuration
into the denim-thick...