The Dictators' Guide to Good Housekeeping

Narrative: The Poem Stays

Abortions will not let you forget.

Gwendolyn Brooks

When she wrote about the damp small pulps

in 1945, it was her first book,

and she was black, twenty, small. And she was a woman.

The editor said, Miss Brooks, please remove this

poem, and she said, The poem stays.

In those days, editors descended from a long train

full of men who lived in houses where things unspoken

happened, speeding away from things beginning to turn.

I like to think of them standing in Random House,

her little sheaf inside a warehouse of stacked words.

What is there to say about a poem complete

in its understanding of what never was

by a writer who would not be shaped by silence.

Of two people in a dim room, one in white

shirtsleeves, one adjusting her hat before she steps

out to the sidewalk and squints up at the sun.