Poem: Children Listen

‘‘You must grow wildly over the graves’’ rings too true for what many of us have known, for what many of us must find ways to tell our children. I write this thinking about Emmett Till and about how a more horrifying story is the burying of a child. But I also write thinking about the tomorrows of the children we’re trying to love today. Roger Reeves gives us something we must remind them, something about how we’re not always right when we predict doom — and maybe, just maybe, our children must become something we can’t fully name to make this earth right again. Selected by Reginald Dwayne Betts

Credit…Illustration by R. O. Blechman

Children Listen

By Roger Reeves

It turns out however that I was deeply
Mistaken about the end of the world
The body in flames will not be the body
In flames but just a house fire ignored
The black sails of that solitary burning
Boat rubbing along the legs of lovers
Flung into a Roman sky by a carousel
The lovers too sick in their love
To notice a man drenched in fire on a porch
Or a child aflame mistaken for a dog
Mistaken for a child running to tell of a bomb
That did not knock before it entered
In Gaza with its glad tidings of abundant joy
In Kazimierz a god is weeping
In a window one golden hand raised
Above his head as if he’s slipped
On the slick rag of the future our human
Kindnesses unremarkable as the flies
Rubbing their legs together while standing
On a slice of cantaloupe Children
You were never meant to be human
You must be the grass
You must grow wildly over the graves

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet and a lawyer. He created Freedom Reads, an initiative to curate microlibraries and install them in prisons across the country. His latest collection of poetry, “Felon,” explores the post-incarceration experience. His 2018 article in The New York Times Magazine about his journey from teenage carjacker to working lawyer won a National Magazine Award. Roger Reeves is a poet whose work includes the forthcoming “Best Barbarian” (W.W. Norton, March 2022). His first book won the Levis Reading Prize, the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and a John C. Zacharis First Book Award.