Friday from the Archives: “Waiting for America” and “Isaac in Durham” two poems by Mendi Lewis Obadike from NCLR 13 (2004)
Waiting for America
by Mendi Lewis Obadike
She says she is waiting for America
to elect a black president.
Me too, I sigh, but I know
they would kill him. She stops.
Look at me, she says.
Heat quickens to my cheeks.
Today she is a wife in La Zurza.
(cook wash cook hang cook fold)
Yesterday she was in prison, the bare
hungry daughter of a hung patriot.
She hides her body behind a sheet
stretched wide as her arms,
I missed my father growing up
and reappears as she doubles,
then quarters the cloth,
but it had to happen.
I could not trade this freedom,
not even to have him back.
Mendi Obadike is an interdisciplinary artist who works collaboratively with artist Keith Obadike. They have exhibited and performed at The New Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Museum of Modern Art. Their projects include four books, two albums, and a series of large-scale public sound artworks. Mendi is on the faculty at Cornell after teaching at Pratt Institute. She has served as a postdoctoral fellow in the study of race and ethnicity at Princeton University, and as visiting artist at Northwestern University, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Princeton University. She earned a BA in English from Spelman College and a Ph.D. In Literature from Duke University.
Her first book of poetry, Armor and Flesh, was reviewed in NCLR 2005.
Read both poems on Gale Cengage or order the NCLR 2004 issue.
