I finally finished Danez Smith's "[Insert] Boy" and was as impressed at the end as I was at the beginning. Perhaps Neruda's "Book of Questions" wasn't the first, but in Smith's poem "Song of the Wreckage" he echoes Neruda with a series of questions. The last three:
Who do the ants think has the best meat?
Please, will you show me something beautiful?
If I play dead, will I be acting my age?
While this Song near the end is one of the longest, if not the longest poem, in the book, I couldn't help stop and pause at these lines, especially the final one. The entire collection deals with the gay black (african american) experience, and let me say, that his poems give an entire different light to the gay black versus gay white experience. Aspects I could relate to, and others just moved me, and made me regret that we live in a society where such a loss of life is considered normal. When this happened, I don't know, but too often the proof is in the newspapers, and it is an unpleasant truth, one that most Americans would pretend didn't exist. While everyone is agreement that "Black Lives Matter," and most would argue the "ALL Lives Matter," what those people who insist on ALL are missing is that White Americans are much more "agreeable" to allowing a Black person die at the hands of the law or a vigilante than we are a White person, hence the emphasis that Black lives do matter, regardless of the indifference of Whites. If it takes a protest to get notice, then by all means, get a protest going. It is unfortunate that today's resurgence is just a repeat of history, and as a country we really haven't learned squat.
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