ORDINARY HAZARDS, BY NIKKI GRIMES (and another haiku of a president)

I can’t believe another Friday is here! Thank you, Jone Rush MacCulloh, for hosting Poetry Friday at Deo Writer. A journal give away, don’t miss it!

Last week I posted two novels in verse and one memoir in verse. This week I read another wonderful memoir in verse.

At a Highlights retreat I attended over a year ago, Nikki Grimes, the award winning author of numerous books for young people, talked with attendees about her work in progress, a memoir in verse, about her troubled but fascinating childhood. She spoke with much insight about the challenge of retrieving memories. And in ORDINARY HAZARDS, she writes:

                      THE MYSTERY OF MEMORY #4
                       
                       Where do memories hide?
                          They sneak into
                        Hard-to-reach crevices,
                       and nestle quietly until
                          some random thought
                         or question burrows in,
                          hooks one by the tail
                               and pulls
                       Finally, out into the light
                                it comes,
                               sheepishly. 

Nikki Grimes writes so honestly in poems about the struggles she faced beginning in the 1950’s as a very small girl. This includes her mother’s mental illness, a frightening foster care system, poverty, assaults and bullying by local gang members, and sexual abuse by her step-father, to name some of the “hazards” she encountered. And overlying all of this is one of the largest, the ever present racism that she, as black person, faced every day. The setting is New York City.

Nikki moves from home to home, school to school, often feeling like an outsider. She writes in her notebook concerning one of her foster homes:

Notebook

"Don't get comfortable,"
my foster sister Grace tells me.
"You don't belong here."
Thanks a lot! Like I don't know
I don't belong anywhere . . . 

She describes her relationship with her mother who was schizophrenic, alcoholic, and unreliable. But it’s clear how important her mother is in these evocative lines.

SIZE DOESN'T MATTER

Four-foot-nine.
Such a tiny person
to have her initials
carved so deeply into
the meat of my soul. 

There is a lot of heartbreak in these pages, but this memoir is also full of joy.

She writes about her many blessings, such as her sister’s affection, her faith in God, the comfort she discovers in books, her gift for writing, teachers who encourage, school friends, a father who was there to support her as an artist, amazing mentors, such as James Baldwin, who when she was a teen, asked to see her work, and always, her indomitable spirit. She more than survives.

She meets others who provide a larger, world view. In her notebook is this excerpt:

Notebook

"This too shall pass,"
my teacher tells me.
I'd suck my teeth and turn away,
but I don't because 
Mrs. Wexler told me
she's a Holocaust survivor,
and I read
The Diary of Anne Frank

It’s impossible to do justice to ORDINARY HAZARDS with these few lines. It must be read and it’s well worth the time.

Now, as for a poem of mine to share here at Poetry Friday, I’ll share a fifth “Guess who haiku,” about yet another president.

Does anyone recognize this guy? Read on.

 Soon after the war
 declared Reconstruction done—
 fear ruled the bayous.


 

 #19 RUTHERFORD B. HAYES (1877-1881) This president removed all the troops from the South, ending Reconstruction. He believed in racial equality but wrongly believed Southern whites would treat blacks fairly. A hundred years of lynching and other violence against blacks followed.
 

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