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Hip-Hop Ghazal

By Patricia Smith b. 1955 Patricia Smith

Gotta love us brown girls, munching on fat, swinging blue hips,

decked out in shells and splashes, Lawdie, bringing them woo hips.

As the jukebox teases, watch my sistas throat the heartbreak,

inhaling bassline, cracking backbone and singing thru hips.

Like something boneless, we glide silent, seeping 'tween floorboards,

wrapping around the hims, and ooh wee, clinging like glue hips.

Engines grinding, rotating, smokin', gotta pull back some.

Natural minds are lost at the mere sight of ringing true hips.

Gotta love us girls, just struttin' down Manhattan streets

killing the menfolk with a dose of that stinging view. Hips.

Crying 'bout getting old—Patricia, you need to get up off

what God gave you. Say a prayer and start slinging. Cue hips.

Source: Poetry (July/August 2007).

Biography

Patricia Smith, who has been called “a testament to the power of words to change lives,” is the author of five books of poetry, including Blood Dazzler (2008), a chronicle of the human and environmental cost of Hurricane Katrina and nominated for a National Book Award, and Teahouse of the Almighty, a 2005 National Poetry Series selection published by Coffee House Press. Her poems have been published in The Paris Review and . . .

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