Patricia Smith

Patricia Smith has been called “a testament to the power of words to change lives.” She is the author of seven books of poetry, including Incendiary Art (2017), winner of an NAACP Image Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (2012), which won the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler (2008), a chronicle of the human and environmental cost of Hurricane Katrina which was nominated for a National Book Award; and Teahouse of the Almighty, a 2005 National Poetry Series selection published by Coffee House Press. Smith collaborated with the photographer Michael Abramson on the book Gotta Go Gotta Flow: Life, Love, and Lust on Chicago’s South Side From the Seventies (2015). Her work has appeared in Poetry magazine, the Paris Review, the New York Times, TriQuarterly, Tin House, the Washington Post, and in both Best American Poetry and Best American Essays. Source

Their Savior Was Me

Now, everything that breathes

knows my given name, the full of it,

The scars it leaves on the skyline.

They know my moments of mercy,

And yes, how calmly I can kill.

The bastard child of a bluesman and an ocean,

I won’t die until music does. But I

have never heard a prayer

that began with my name,

gave me pause,

forced me to rearrange my wind

instead, I listened, bemused, to thirty-four

snotty pleas addressed to the idea of Him,

the ghost in the air, my rumored father.

I was all the seconds they had left.

They should have smothered me with kneeling.

Instead, in their old scratched voices,

They begged the wet air for salvation. They called

Lord, Lord, Lord,

until I was forced to show them my face.

Published:

2008

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2023

Themes:

Faith & Hope

Identity