This ’hood’s vast
and I’m its chief
sentinel, a natural
born horn.
I’m a clarion
nation, the itch
in heaven’s
evening clothes.
Where I’m from
ain’t no “my bad”—
I am bad: That’s
truth. So pony
up, falsettoed
crotch-grabbers, you
whistling wannabes,
and listen to
what’s real: I don’t
have to touch it
to know that it’s there.
This poem is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.
contributor
contributor
Rita Dove is a former US poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner (Thomas and Beulah, 1987). She is the author of numerous poetry books, a novel, short stories, and a play, and is the editor of The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Her honors include the 1996 National Humanities Medal from President Clinton and the 2011 National Medal of Arts from President Obama—the only poet ever to receive both medals—as well as the Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and a 2017 NAACP Image Award for Collected Poems: 1974–2004. She is the Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. Her next volume of poems, Playlist for the Apocalypse, is forthcoming from W. W. Norton in the summer of 2021.
