Charleston SC poetry
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The Charleston Mayoral Inauguration Poem – “Reimagining History”
It’s a beautiful time to be in Charleston. As we transition into a new year, we celebrate a new mayor, John Tecklenburg. John and his wife, Sandy, reached out to Marjory Wentworth and I last year after we performed a free benefit concert for the families of the Emanuel AME victims. At that event, the […]
Poem: “Mahogany”
Who decided to call us “black and white”? When I look at my skin, I don’t see black, I see brown. Brown. Like the color of sand, a brilliant tan that needs no sun. Brown, like the mahogany tree bark, grounded in the summer, whose green leaves make the transition into fall, coffee-stained by the […]
New poem – “greater than (or) equal to”
I was born the year our country celebrated its 200th birthday. Less than a decade from Martin Luther King Jr.’s assasination, 113 years after the emancipation proclimation. Here’s a bicentennial baby obsessed with numbers, released from his mother’s womb into a wounded society. He opened his eyes to a binary world where 0’s and 1’s […]
A poem about Charleston
I was blessed to be able to perform this poem at Lowcountry Local First’s Good Business Summit on August 27 at the Charleston Museum. Text is below. You can also hear my version with Quentin E. Baxter on iTunes. charleston, where the sidewalks scream on saturday nights and the corners rotate budding musicians with skin-tight […]
“circadian rhythms”
at ground zero of death, the voice of God will sound like an alarm clock, waking you up from a dream. you open your eyes and see yourself, not as a woman or man, but as a spirit who had been breathing in an illusion. on June 18, the voice of God sounded like an […]
Black Cloth – a poem for Charleston
Racism, let us no longer walk in your shoes. you are a traveler of darkness, a walker of shadows, cloaking yourself in a black cloth like the grim reaper and arming your soul with the tools of a terrorist – a misguided soldier who’s trying to start a war. My sisters, heaven was as close […]
Poem – “self portrait (in bloom)”
when i was in the 8th grade, i wore baggy pants and my bookbag on my chest because i was not bold enough to throw the monkey off my back. inside of the backpack was a lack of confidence weighing me down. i had not found my voice. this is the portrait of a black […]
Video: Young poets in Charleston, SC
My poetic energy is moving toward youth poetry. Hopefully, my experience in the art form can help the students improve their writing. Charleston is home to a lot of talented, forward-thinking young poets. I’ve been blessed to be a part of Matthew Foley’s Holy City Youth Slam, an organization that is bringing together youths in […]
Poem: b r e a t h e
two words with two G’s spread hate like a disease the smoke is everywhere and i can’t breathe. it only took one arm to squeeze the life out of an unarmed man the only thing in his hands were the lifelines embedded on his palms, now we stand on the front lines singing songs of […]
Poem: “CODE.”
If I write lines of poems like I write lines of code, no comma would be out of place and every quotation mark left open would throw the whole piece off center. Maybe coding is, in fact, poetry. Maybe life is, in fact, poetry and we are the result of a Universal code where X’s […]
