NYU Black Renaissance Noire Volume 18 Issue 1 - Winter 2018

poetry By Andre Bagoo Walt Whitman in Trinidad I It was your father who used to drink, who taught you pleasure was wrong. No song in this song, only ink. Gold pen your door, gold men that make you see. You enter the man your father could not be. Long-Island Star Long Islander Eagle In your book you write, Loved reader, let your children read it. That our children be yours. That you become our father, the father you assume. moral heart pages live young man iii: Erasure from Page Two of Walt Whitman’s Novel Against Drinking ii. Erasure from Page One of Walt Whitman’s Introduction to His Novel Against Drinking Reader, I was that youth Amid the rows of books that run like lines in this poem, a letter to yourself. A novel in which you are buried — your most dangerous part. Walt, all these leaves won’t hide your heart. They won’t stop the grass that will come when the war brings you to the edge. Grass, coming fast. I worship the moss that grows between the pages of a book thrown away, until all that was written is as black as truth, a fiction, at last, that never lies. THE story reader i. On His Novel Against Drinking

NYU Black Renaissance Noire Volume 18 Issue 1 - Winter 2018 | Page 16