On Boston Common a white girl digs in the sand, swings
with black kids, climbs the bars, and if she looks
long at hair, color and eyes
What
does she think, what does she know?
*
Together a black man, a white woman and her mother enter
a New York art gallery; they separate. The air in one room freezes,
until the white mother returns and hugs the man.
He smiles.
Announces, “I’m a big scary black man.”
*
At JFK a woman waits for the flight from Cameroon, it’s landed;
people and bags emerge. She stares at each, until a girl
with many braids stops, “Mom. It’s me.” Later
they unbraid her hair,
detach extensions; in the kitchen fingers fly as they talk.
*
On a dust road not far from the Great Rift Valley
school children line a stick fence, shout “Mzungu, Mzungu”
at visiting white teachers.
Those outside see
those inside, who see those who see them see them.
Molly Mattfield Bennett is the author of two books of poetry, Name the Glory (2010) and Point-No-Point (2016). She has published in the journals Knock, Antioch (Seattle, WA.), Constellations, Ibbetson Street (Somerville, MA.), Off the Coast, Wilderness House Review and Bagels With the Bards. For years Molly has combined writing poetry with teaching young children and their teachers, raising daughters, being a Unitarian minister’s wife and leading a writing group. She lives in Quincy, Massachusetts and is an active participant in the Boston poetry community – honored to read at the Boston Public Library during the Boston National Poetry Month Festival and to be one of three poets invited to participate at the June 2012 Jeff Male Memorial Reading at the William Joiner Institute’s Writers’ Conference, University of Massachusetts, Boston.
