Self-Portrait

By Afaa Michael Weaver b. 1951 Afaa Michael Weaver

I see myself in the shadows of a leaf

compressed to the green blades growing

to a point like the shards of miles of mirrors

falling and cracking to perfect gardens.

I never inspect the withered assumption

of my face’s petty dialogue in raindrops,

the deceptive spreading of the words

oozing from the skin to the edges of water

etched on the ground by gravity and wishing.

Passing for the seriousness of my eye,

platitudes of my white collar or

the perfect posture of my lips, it skirts

from the leaves of the plant hiding me

and sits stoic like stone in my pupil,

mute and unassuming, like Rashi.

To gather myself I will swim naked

in the wind, bending my blind elbows

in circles, stopping now to dance

like the cherubic gold on the ark,

and gather myself from the particles

of this excitement another structure,

one closely resembling the beginning.

Source: Multitudes: Poems Selected & New (Sarabande Books, 2000)

Biography

A native of Baltimore, Maryland, Afaa Michael Weaver was born Michael S. Weaver to working class parents in 1951. His poetry echoes the gospel and blues ethos of his mother and father, who were themselves the children of farmers in southernmost Virginia. His father grew up as a sharecropper. The eldest of five children, Weaver graduated from Baltimore Polytechnic high school and entered the University of Maryland in College Park . . .

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