The Universe is a House Party
By Tracy K. Smith
The universe is expanding. Look: postcards
And panties, bottles with lipstick on the rim,
Orphan socks and napkins dried into knots.
Quickly, wordlessly, all of it whisked into file
With radio waves from a generation ago
Drifting to the edge of what doesn’t end,
Like the air inside a balloon. Is it bright?
Will our eyes crimp shut? Is it molten, atomic,
A conflagration of suns? It sounds like the kind of party
Your neighbors forget to invite you to: bass throbbing
Through walls, and everyone thudding around drunk
On the roof. We grind lenses to an impossible strength,
Point them toward the future, and dream of beings
We’ll welcome with indefatigable hospitality:
How marvelous you’ve come! We won’t flinch
At the pinprick mouths, the nubbin limbs. We’ll rise,
Gracile, robust. Mi casa es su casa. Never more sincere.
Seeing us, they’ll know exactly what we mean.
Of course, it’s ours. If it’s anyone’s, it’s ours.
This poem is from Smith's Pulitzer Prize winning collection Life on Mars. I found it in this Dazed article, Black female poets you need to know. In his review of Life on Mars, scholar James Edward Ford III writes, "Afro-futurism treats blackness as a way of envisioning futures. Significantly, this is not "a black thing" that excludes or condescends against other racial groups... Actually Afro-futurism almost necessarily entails cross-cultural appropriation that takes blackness seriously as a creative and critical entry point and way of being."
Also cool to know: Joel Brouwer's review of the collection for The New York Times reads: "Smith’s father was a scientist who worked on the Hubble’s development, and in her elegies mourning his death, outer space serves both as a metaphor for the unknowable zone into which her father has vanished and as a way of expressing the hope that his existence hasn’t ceased, merely changed."
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