Hayden

By Amaud Jamaul Johnson

What did I know, what did I know

Of gazing silences and terrored stone

Brilliances; beauty of what’s hardbitten

The auroral darkness which is God

Then you arrived, meditative, ironic

My head gripped in bony vice

Mouth of agony shaping a cry it cannot utter

What did I know, what did I know

Of a changing permanence

The stains and dirty tools of struggle

Weaving a wish and a weariness together

Years before your time. Years and years

I gaze through layered light

Within the rock of the undiscovered suns

I see, I walk with you among

The landscape lush, metallic, flayed

Behind us, beyond us now

The very sunlight here seems flammable

Source: Red Summer (Tupelo Press, 2006)

Biography

Born and raised in Compton, California, poet Amaud Jamaul Johnson was educated at Howard University and Cornell. His debut collection, Red Summer (2006), examines the infamous race riots of 1919, during which nearly a hundred African American men in cities across the country were lynched. The book won the 2004 Dorset Prize from Tupelo Press. Selecting the volume, judge Carl Phillips noted that “Johnson’s poems remind us that the . . .

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