Clint Smith Poems (An Amazing Collection of Poems)
Clint Smith poems are creatively written by a doctoral candidate at the prestigious havard university as well as an author of counting descent.
Clint Smith Poems
The National Science Foundation, Cave Canem, and the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop have all awarded Clint Smith grants while he is a doctorate candidate at Harvard University.
A meta-historical travelogue book titled How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America and the poetry collection Counting Descent (2016) are both written by Clint Smith (2021).
Below is a collection of the best of Clint Smith poems. These poems are amazing and promise to be really enlightening.
1. FaceTime by Clint Smith
On another night
in a hotel
in a room
in a city
flanked by all
that is unfamiliar
I am able to move
my finger along
a glass screen
once across
& in seconds
see your mother
smiling in a room
that is our own
that is now so
far away but
also not so far
away at all
& she can place
the small screen
near her belly
& when I speak
I can see you
moving beneath
her skin as if you
knew that this
distance was
only temporary
& what a small
yet profound
joy it is to be some-
where that is not
with you but to
still be with you
& see your feet
dance beneath
her rib cage like
you knew we’d
both be dancing
together soon.
2. Playground Elegy
The first time I slid down a slide my mother
told me to hold my hands in towards the skysomething about gravity, weight distribution,
& feeling the air ripple through your fingers.I remember reaching the bottom, smile consuming
half of my face, hands still in the air becauseI didn’t want it to stop. Ever since, this defiance
of gravity has always been synonymous with feeling alive.When I read of the new child, his body strewn across
the street, a casket of bones and concrete I wonder howmany times he slid down the slide. How many times
he defied gravity to answer a question in class. Did heraise his hands for all of them? Does my mother regret
this? That she raised a black boy growing up to thinkthat raised hands made me feel more alive. That raised hands
meant I was alive. That raised hands meant I would live.
READ ALSO!!!
- Sylvia Plath Love Poems
- Halloween Poems for Kids
- Amanda Lovelace Poems
- Poems with Figurative Language
- Poems for 3rd Graders
3. Counterfactual
One night
when I was twelve years old
on a field trip some place
I can’t remember, my friends
and I bought supersoakersand turned the hotel parking lot
into our arena of saturation.
We hid behind cars
running through the darkness
that lay between the streetlights.
Seditious laughter ubiquitous
across the pavement.Within ten minutes
my father came outside
grabbed me by the forearm
and led me inside to our room
with an unfamiliar grip.Before I could invoke objection,
acquaint him with how foolish
he had made me look in front
of my friends,
he derided me for being so naïve.Told me I couldn’t be out here
acting the same as these white boys—
can’t be pretending to shoot guns
can’t be running in the dark
can’t be hiding behind anything
other than your own teeth.I know now how scared
he must have been,
how easily I could have fallen
into the obsolescence of the night.
That some man would mistake
this water for a good reason
to wash all of this away.
4. Shedding
I scrub the shower once a week.
Put the washcloth down
with one hand,
pick the sponge up
with the other.
The interplay between bleach & soap
rest heavy in the back of my throat.I get on my hands and knees
& scrub
while the shower is still running.
Pellets pummeling my back,
an unfettered tango
of hygienics and submission.On the days I scrub the hardest,
I don’t know
whether the residue is coming
from my body
or the things that it has
previously left behind.
READ ALSO!!!
- Erin Hanson Poems
- Victor Hugo Poems
- Poems About Eating Disorders
- Birthday Love Poems
- Poems About God’s Love
5. When Hiding in the Mountains Isn’t Enough
I have tried to bury your
syllables somewhere in these
mountains. Blindfolded myself
so that I would never know where
you lay. Rendered your name more
grenade than seed. Thought this soil
& granite would suffocate the explosion
beneath my feet. But you are still the vibrations
I feel with every step. White noise under the earth.
Constant.
Until I forget that you are even there.
6. Something You Should Know
is that as a kid, I once worked at a pet store.
I cleaned the cages
of small animals like turtles, hamsters,
rabbits, and hermit crabs.
I watched the hermit crab continue
to grow, molt, shed its skin and scurry across
the bottom of the aquarium to find a new shell.
Which left me afraid for the small creature,
to run around all exposed that way, to have
to live its entire life requiring something else
to feel safe. Perhaps that is when I became afraid
of needing anything beyond myself. Perhaps
that is why, even now, I can want so desperately
to show you all of my skin, but am more afraid
of meeting you, exposed, in open water.
READ ALSO!!!
7. When people say, “we have made it through worse before” by Clint Smith
all I hear is the wind slapping against the gravestones
of those who did not make it, those who did not
survive to see the confetti fall from the sky, those who
did not live to watch the parade roll down the street.
I have grown accustomed to a lifetime of aphorisms
meant to assuage my fears, pithy sayings meant to
convey that everything ends up fine in the end. There is no
solace in rearranging language to make a different word
tell the same lie. Sometimes the moral arc of the universe
does not bend in a direction that will comfort us.
Sometimes it bends in ways we don’t expect & there are
people who fall off in the process. Please, dear reader,
do not say I am hopeless, I believe there is a better future
to fight for, I simply accept the possibility that I may not
live to see it. I have grown weary of telling myself lies
that I might one day begin to believe. We are not all left
standing after the war has ended. Some of us have
become ghosts by the time the dust has settled.
At Harvard University, Clint Smith is a teacher, poet, and Ph.D. candidate in education. He has won the National Poetry Slam, placed in the finals of the Individual World Poetry Slam, and represented the US Department of State as a cultural ambassador.
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Daily Time Poems.