Armstead, Azia

English

Open Access Journal Atlanta University Center

Birthday Poem“You may rejoice, I must mourn”—Frederick DouglassWe wait for the show to begin in an open field on a blazing summer night.Fireworks are most lucent in the blackness of a sky with no sun whichmakes me think of blackness as a metaphor, how colors shine brightestwhen contrasted against it. Burning hues explode above our heads then sizzleto nothingness, beautiful and short-lived as a life with an untimely end.A series of thunderous booms jolt the chest, almost hard enough to break the bodyinto a ghost. There’s a violence to this magic. It leaves a smoke that doesn’t clearuntil we do. They celebrate their fathers, their nation and its wildness and I don’tknow what I have to do with any of it, except I know the short distance between joyand defeat and that nothing you love ever belongs to you. Sometimes, I wish I hadbeen born on some other day. In the sweltering summer of ‘96, my mother welcomesme, her unamerican girl, which makes me think of the irony in such a birth. Blackbaby’s cry drowned by an anthem. America is a strange land in which I have no name,a country with which I share a birthday despite the immeasurable distance between us.Note: This poem borrows language from Frederick Douglass’ speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”“Birthday Poem” from The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database. © 2019 by Azia Armstead. Reprinted with permission of Azia Armstead. All rights reserved.Azia Armstead

Birthday Poem

https://journals.auctr.edu/index.php/auntchloe/article/download/759/479

Birthday Poem

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Open Access Journal Atlanta University Center