None of My Black Friends Want to Listen to Don't Stop Believin' by Hanif Abdurraqib
31 Days of Poetry: Day 22.
It’s August 22nd, which means we’ve officially reached the last ten days of the month. I can’t quite believe it but the date doesn’t lie… Only ten poems left to go.
Today’s offering is ‘None of My Black Friends Want to Listen to Don’t Stop Believin’’ by Hanif Abdurraqib, which was first published in his 2019 collection, ‘A Fortune for Your Disaster’ (Tin House Press).
None of My Black Friends Want to Listen to Don't Stop Believin’ but we all know what it is when the street / light comes on & I don't mean to romanticize darkness but I do perhaps mean to say I want to dance in the moments before the sunset lets me out of its clutches & fear carves a rib into the pit of some mother's stomach. The news says that soon it's going to feel like summer all year & then what will we make of winter & the way nighttime gallops in before our bodies are ready to lie down with each other & I know. I hear you thinking there he goes again. But let me promise you that this time it really is just about a song & the coins rattling in my pocket & the way they beg to be pushed into a jukebox when the sky is a color that demands singing & nothing else. But if you will indulge me—since you are still here—I will say the words hold on to that feeling & the wind might blow the shadow of someone you miss through your outstretched fingers. I don't know anymore what it is we are all reaching for, but here we are & somewhere along the line we learned the difference between the gospel that will keep us out of hell & the shit they play to wake up the polo shirts in suburban pews & I say we & you already know I mean those of us who have reached for a song & pulled back a coffin & we don't sing our gospel in bars. We don't sing where we sin. We don't lock arms and wake up a hood that ain't ours, where they call the cops if a leaf rattles outside a window past midnight & this is why I hang back under the flickering street / light & listen to the hum of rusting air conditioners buzzing in late November & maybe all the songs we don't want to sing out loud anymore are about someone on a porch, wringing their hands together & hoping a person who shares their blood cuts through the night & walks into their arms.
The more I read this poem, the more deeply I’m affected by it. I’m deeply moved by way it confronts the realities of pain, hardship, grief, violence- particularly against the Black body; the way it knows fear so intimately but still dares to express hope; the way it knows the darkness of the night and still chooses to claim its light.
'hold on to that feeling & the wind might blow the shadow of someone you miss through your outstretched fingers...'
I could read these lines over and over again.
See you on day twenty-three,
Tasnim
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