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Sarah Kay performs Hand Me Downs
Posted in Spoken Word
Comments: 0 • Likes: 1 • Views: 3904
Video Details for Sarah Kay performs Hand Me Downs
Sarah Kay performs spoken word poem Hand Me Downs at Urbana 10th Anniversary Celebration at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City.
Hand Me Downs
by Sarah Kay
I know
You’ve taken to wearing around your father’s hand me down anger
But I wish that you wouldn’t
It’s a few sizes too big and everyone can see it doesn’t fit you
Makes you look silly
Hangs lose in all the wrong places even if it does match your skin color
I know
You think you’ll grow into it
That your arms will beef up after all the fighting
And it will sit on your shoulders if only you pin it in the right places with well-placed conviction
The bathroom mirror tells you look good in it
That it makes your fists look a lot more justified
And when you dig your hands deep into the pockets you’ll find stories he left there for you to hand out to the other boys like car bombs
And on days when everything else is slipping through your fingers
This you can wrap yourself inside of
This will keep you warm at night
Help you drift off to sleep with the certainty that no matter what it will still be there when you wake up
And the longer you wear it the better it starts to fit
Until some of those stories are your own
Maybe the holes in the sleeves are from the bullets you dodged yourself
So when it rips, snags on a barbed wire fence or someone else’s family
Don’t worry
Cause your mother and sister will help mend it
Patch the holes so the tears
Replace a button or two
Help you back into it and tell you how proud they are of you
How good it looks on you
The same way it looked on your dad and your grand-dad too and on his dad before him and on his father before him
But back then
Back then there was only sand
Until someone drew a line
Someone built a wall
Someone threw a stone
And the crack in the skull that it hit fractured perfectly outward like twigs on the branches of the limbs of a family tree
So someone threw a stone back
And each fracture, each tiny break, wound itself together into thread
The thread pulled itself around him
Your great great great great somebody
And on the other side of that wall they were knitting just as fast
And there’s fit them just as well
But only in a slightly different shade
So I’m asking
When the time comes
Who’s gonna be the first one to put down the needle and thread
Who’s gonna be the first one to remember that their grandpa suffered just as many broken windows, broken hearts, broken bones
And the first time you come down to dinner
And your son is sitting at the dining room table
With your hatred on his shoulders
Who’s gonna be the first one to tell him
It’s finally time to take it off
Keywords
Spoken Word
Comments: 0 - Likes: 1 - Views: 3904
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