Vox Populi

A Public Sphere for Poetry, Politics, and Nature. Over 15,000 daily subscribers. Over 7,000 archived posts.

Michael T. Young: Two Poems

Plagiarism, From the Latin
Plagium Meaning “a Kidnapping”
My friend leaned into me,
clapped his hand on my shoulder
and called me a word he paid for
with the color of his skin,
 
and it meant he liked me.
I wanted to be liked
and sent his word back to him.
But from my mouth it cracked
 
like a whip, its leather
braided from the history of my people
enslaving his people,
and we were tossed on a ship
 
crossing the Atlantic in 1619,
and there was no way to unsay
the distance, no passage back,
no way to return what I’d taken.

--


White Privilege
 
 
When you’re not the target
you can ignore the gun. 

--

Copyright 2022 Michael T. Young

Michael T. Young's books include The Infinite Doctrine 
of Water published by Terrapin.
Michael T. Young

3 comments on “Michael T. Young: Two Poems

  1. loranneke
    June 16, 2022

    those three last lines: “no way to unsay
    the distance, no passage back,
    no way to return what I’d taken.”!

    Liked by 4 people

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Information

This entry was posted on June 16, 2022 by in Poetry, Social Justice and tagged , , , , , .

Enter your email address to follow Vox Populi and receive new posts by email.

Join 15,744 other subscribers

Blog Stats

  • 4,648,660 hits

Archives

%d bloggers like this: