Annunciation

by Tracy K. Smith

I feel ashamed, finally,

Of our magnificent paved roads,

Our bridges slung with steel,

Our vivid glass, our tantalizing lights,

Everything enhanced, rehearsed,

A trick. I’ve turned old. I ache most

To be confronted by the real,

By the cold, the pitiless, the bleak.

By the red fox crossing a field

After snow, by the broad shadow

Scraping past overhead.

My young son, eyes set

At an indeterminate distance,

Ears locked, tuned inward, caught

In some music only he has ever heard.

Not our cars, our electronic haze.

Not the piddling bleats and pings

That cause some hearts to race.

Ashamed. Like a pebble, hard

And small, hoping only to be ground to dust

By something large and strange and cruel.

From Wade in the Water. Reproduced with kind permission of Penguin Books UK

Forward Prizes for Poetry

Shortlisted for Best Collection 2018

Wade in the Water

Tracy K. Smith

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About Tracy K. Smith

Tracy K. Smith (b. 1972, Falmouth, Massachusetts) is the Poet Laureate of the United States. She began writing poems aged ten, but it was not until she lost her mother to cancer at 22 that poetry became in her words ‘a tool for living’.

The four books she published prior to Wade on the Water established her as one of the most exciting poets in the USA. In 2012 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Life on Mars — a collection she has described as ‘looking out to the universe and forward to an imagined future’; Wade in the Water, by contrast, looks ‘earthward and backward’, confronting unflinchingly the moral crises of race and history in America.

Smith is also a librettist and translator. She is currently writing the libretto for an opera entitled Castor and Patience, and co-translating the work of the contemporary Chinese poet Yi Lei.