messengers: whitten and wilkins
by MIGUEL BYRD
in Fall 2025
Tafari Melisizwe, “Ancestors Song,” 2024
messengers: whittten and wilkins
these worlds undo New World
blackness irrupts the canvas
the history of art, an irrelevance
as intergalactic paints twirl
Alabama merges with Kemet
a pre-black blackness emerges
anyone seen where jim crow went?
crowds gather 'round the quartet
window dressing for some, i bet
the glassed enclosure of modern
art shatters when Kweku drums
and Immanuel's sax walks us out
to unpoliced land where sounds of
our folks can breathe and stretch
back across the Atlantic without
the capture of a midtown night out
or entertaining murderers on deck
Miguel Byrd is a 5th grade history teacher from Elizabeth, New Jersey. His love of poetry was reignited when he spent several weeks teaching the art form to second graders last school year. The enthusiasm and willingness around poetry that his students expressed sent him back to revisit the works of Sterling Allen Brown, Sonia Sanchez, and René Depestre. He spends his time away from teaching focused primarily on reading literature dealing with who Africans are to each other, working towards ways to apply conceptual categories from the Africana Studies framework to each lesson plan.
