Theme of poem "amen" by james baldwin
Answers
I.
Brave New Voices ended on Sunday, and I am still physically and emotionally recovering from the week. I haven’t processed everything that’s happened yet. Charlotte placed in the top twelve teams in the world after we got third place at semi-finals. I’m incredibly proud of the work we did as a team, both on and off the stage, both in poetry and outside of it.
II.
For the first time, I broke down after performing a poem. It’s been a year and a half since I wrote Instruction Manual for Becoming a Nice Southern Boy, and I’ve performed it at least twenty times on various stages, but even before I went on stage Friday, I knew this time would be different. I stepped out of the room before the bout started and my insides felt like paint chipping, like glass beginning to shatter. Nothing was different in my performance until the last few lines, and before I knew it, the pain of the poem broke down all the levees I had built to suppress what I had actually written. I collapsed immediately after walking away from the microphone, and my team had to help me out of the room. My mother held me as I cried like I was mourning someone else, a boy long forgotten and suddenly on my doorstep: echo returning to the tongue that birthed it.
III.
I tell my mother that my depression is back, but the truth is that I’m not sure it ever left in the first place. She doesn’t come for me until I told my coach to get her from the room; perhaps it is the memory of the first time washing over her that paralyzes her as I fall to the floor in front of an entire crowd. She tells me everything I must do to get better and I remember that I am a doctor’s child, listening for a recipe to cure this cold that will not leave my body. I am beginning to think of joy as an afterthought. Perhaps I am exhalation first and breath second.
IV.
I still see Mf. on social media and I don’t feel anything at the sight of her. By now, I imagine she doesn’t think of me as more than casualty, apology. I don’t miss her so much as I miss falling asleep alone before the mornings with her, those fleeting moments when slumber felt more like the best kind of death, pulse slowing in rhythm with hers just a floor below, bones in stillness, yearning to dream and never wake up.