> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://poetry101.love/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Safe Subjects
- URL: https://poetry101.love/safe-subjects/
- Published: 2020-11-15T05:07:00.000Z
- Updated: 2021-01-05T17:24:43.000Z
- Description: by Yusef Komunyakaa
- Author: Melissa Anderson
- Tags: Yusef Komunyakaa, Morning Memory, #Import 2026-11-04 19:11

How can love heal  
the mouth shut this way?  
Say something worth breath.  
Let is surface, recapitulate  
how fat leeches press down gently  
on the sex goddesses' eyelids.  
Let truth have its way with us  
like a fishhook holds  
to life, holds dearly to nothing  
worth saying—pull it out,  
bringing with it hard facts,  
knowledge that the fine underbone  
of hope is also attached  
to inner self, underneath it all.  
Undress. No don't be afraid  
even to get Satan mixed up in this  
acknowledgment of thorns:  
meaning there's madness  
in the sperm, in the egg,  
fear breathing in its blood sac,  
true accounts not so easily  
written off the sad book.

Say something about pomegranates.  
Say something about real love.  
Yes, true love—more than  
parted lips, than parted legs  
in sorrow's darkroom of potash  
& blues. Let the brain stumble  
from its hiding place, from its cell block,  
to the edge of oblivion  
to come to itself, sharp-tongued  
as a boar's grin in summer moss  
where a vision rides the back  
of God, at this masquerade.  
Redemptive as a straight razor  
against a jugular vein—  
unacknowledged & unforgiven.  
It's truth we're after here,  
hurting for, out in the streets  
where my brothers kill each other,  
each other's daughters & guardian angels  
in the opera of dead on arrival.

Say something that resuscitates  
us, behind the masks,  
as we stumble off into neon lights  
to loveless beds & a second skin  
of loneliness. Something political as dust  
& earthworms at work in the temple  
of greed & mildew, where bowed lamps  
cast down shadows like blueprints of graves.  
Say something for us who can't believe  
in the creed of nightshade.  
Yes, say something to us dreamers  
who decode the message of dirt  
between ancient floor boards  
as black widow spiders  
lay translucent eggs  
in the skull of a dead mole  
under a dogwood in full bloom.

Komunyakaa, Yusef. [Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems](https://www.google.com/books/edition/Neon%5FVernacular/RfdQkcrJn2QC?hl=en&gbpv=0&kptab=getbook&ref=poetry101.love). United States, Wesleyan University Press, 2013.

Your browser does not support the audio element. 

### Why I chose this poem

When I taught high school, I turned this in as my professional development goal. I knew most of it inadvertently because I've turned to it over and over. It's present again because I'm getting older and I watch, decade after decade, as folks in the the US rediscover systemic racism, while the underlying systems and their effect continue.