& be mighty, black satin savior stretched around my scalptake me in your hand & make me like the water. be a wayto tell my people i am their people, sheer cape falling downmy neck make me superhero, captain save a hoefrom myself, rag to make my unragged morningslet me wake up Black & alive & Black & alive & thinking i’m cute.lord of lawds, be a fence around my fly, be shield, be rockbe spell, be a dark & lovely magic, sweet Jesus, if you Godbe God, let whatever reaches toward us to end us slick pass.let America drown in our waves, if a bullet must touch uslet it graze soft as a bristle brush, let us spill no blood on a daywe feel beautiful & we be beautiful, let us know it, be casketsharp & banned from early caskets. no Black person will die in this poembut these waves might hurt somebody, watch yourself, swim goodbe happy we sleep with these rags on. i heard a story once abouta boy who brushed his hair for forty days & forty nights & when hefinally slept he forgot to wrap his ocean up. same night, mamasstarted crawling from his hairline carrying babies, men climbedout his waves like they had just jumped off the boat, a wet armynecromanced from naps. see? this hair is a right kind of holy. see?it’s not hair at all. on top of our dome, a prayer carrying us home.
Jesus be a durag
after Jamila Woods
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“Jesus be a durag” from Bluff. Copyright © 2024 by Danez Smith. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.
Anna Min
Danez Smith is the author of four collections including Don’t Call Us Dead, Homie, and most recently Bluff, a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. They are also the curator of Blues In Stereo: The Early Works of Langston Hughes. For their work, Danez won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry (twice), a Lambda Literary Award, and has been a finalist for the NAACP Image Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. Their prose has been featured in The New Yorker, GQ, Harper’s Bazaar, and elsewhere. Danez lives in the Twin Cities with their people.
Written after two years of artistic silence, during which the world came to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Minneapolis became the epicenter of protest following the murder of George Floyd, Bluff is Danez Smith’s powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet and with their hometown of the Twin Cities. This is a book of awakening out of violence, guilt, shame, and critical pessimism to wonder and imagine how we can strive toward a new existence in a world that seems to be dissolving into desolate futures.
“In these searching, stunning poems, Smith metaphorizes city into body politic, showing us the interstate running through all our hearts; demonstrating that we all contain protest and police, cowardice and commitment, money and kindness, looting and food drives.”
—Nam Le, The New York Times Book Review
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