for his Sunday New York Times column, Nicholas Kristof shares parts of poems readers have sent him. The column, titled When Readers Get it, was the result of a request he put out to readers
because Susan Donnelly, a Massachusetts poet I’ve admired, sent me a powerful piece she wrote after Ferguson. It touched me:
What stays with me more than flames,
broken glass, crowds swarming the streets
after the non-indictment; the edge-of-screen
war correspondent clutching his mic,
reporting low-voiced to us outsiders,
are the tears running down
the young woman’s cheek,
that she keeps swiping, as she tries
to stay calm for the interview.
It’s like —
and she starts again:
They don’t realize we’re human.
Not the fire but the broken heart.
Please keep reading.
In his column, Kristof can only offer selections, but what he offers is moving. He invites you to go to this blog post to read the poems in their entirety.
I have.
I was moved.
To encourage you to go read, both the column and the complete poems, allow me to end with the last two selections in the column, as framed by Kristof:
Uzra Khan was born in India and came to the United States as a teenager. Now a graduate student at Harvard, she says she often puzzles people about her racial or ethnic origins:
What do I look like?
Turkish? Italian? Persian?
Why does it matter...?
While I pass as all,
I ache to belong to one.
Or none, unquestioned.
I’ll give the last word to a 10-year-old girl from London, Natalia Immordino, whose poem began:
The shade of a person is just the cover to their story,
And there is no reason not to open their book.
Indeed.
Peace.