Now from the new book.
I want to dedicate this reading, besides the poem,
to my junior high school homeroom teacher.
You have homeroom teachers?
Did you have homeroom teachers?
Maybe if you're my age.
I don't know if they still do that.
It's a place where you decompress
as an adolescent and whatnot.
In my junior high, it was a time where
you could do your homework because usually your house was
too chaotic.
Or there wasn't room or there wasn't silence,
and so I was able to do my homework or anything
that the homeroom teacher decided
they were going to have you do.
So this is for my homeroom teacher,
for Alfonse Lewis, "Brass Band."
He was also my music teacher.
"Brass Band" for Alfonse Lewis.
"Thank you to my homeroom teacher
for leaving me for hours under a tuba too heavy to lift.
It caged me in my band chair for making something more
than music.
Thank you for your musical hands,
my color, for your stories of women
too pure to touch, your filth, for helping her up to her seat.
Anyway, you a composer, a Beethoven, but Black.
Thank you for getting stuck in that
in that barrio junior high, for making the best of us,
for fighting for our right to die
and be buried with the rest.
For teaching me to question, for making me keep my head down
in order to imagine, for telling me to never mind
my ragged rolled skirts, the broken toed shoes
from Jesus Saves bins on Thursdays.
Thank you for leaving me here to own
my perpetual late, my too far ahead, my never going
to get there, my failure.
Now remembering your name, you are forever
etched in my brass."
[APPLAUSE]