Note to Black Women in America 

By Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Don’t think well of your self
(drink your anger)
Don’t think well of your body
(eat your anger)
Don’t think well of what
you do with your hands
your feet your tongue
your mind your god
whispering rare prophecies
that no one else can hear
(drink your anger)
Don’t think well of your
heroines your revolutions
(eat your anger)
Your courageous ones
whose voices won’t
rattle when they demand
what is due what to do
in this nation of cages
and well-explained blood
(drink your anger)
And remember
don’t think well
of your children
or your children’s children
(eat that anger)
They are only on loan
to you until we name
the day of the slaughter

I’ve been reading the poems of Honorée Fanonne Jeffers since I was a boy in prison. And now, more than a score of years later, her verse is still making the same complicated music. It’s hard, truly, to make some things that need to be said sing. And this poem reminds me of the hardest of call-and-responses. If you can’t see yourself in the conversation being had betwixt and between these lines, the poem becomes a question: What have you chosen to ignore during your days? Selected by Reginald Dwayne Betts