Haiku Happenings #14: Sonia Sanchez’s “14 Haiku” courtesy of the American Academy of Poetry!

(for Emmett Louis Till)

1.
Your limbs buried
in northern muscle carry
their own heartbeat

2.
Mississippi…
alert with
conjugated pain

3.
young Chicago
stutterer whistling
more than flesh

4.
your pores
wild stars embracing
southern eyes

5.
footprints blooming
in the night remember
your blood

6.
in this southern
classroom summer settles
into winter

7.
i hear your
pulse swallowing
neglected light

8.
your limbs
fly off the ground
little birds…

9.
we taste the
blood ritual of
southern hands

10.
blue midnite
breaths sailing on
smiling tongues

11.
say no words
time is collapsing
in the woods

12.
a mother’s eyes
remembering a cradle
pray out loud

13.
walking in Mississippi
i hold the stars
between my teeth

14.
your death
a blues, i could not
drink away.

Copyright © 2010 by Sonia Sanchez. From Morning Haiku (Beacon Press, 2010). Reprinted from Split This Rock’s The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database.