Embedded Files
"Poet Nikky Finney was born in South Carolina, the daughter of a lawyer and teacher. Finney’s parents were both active in the Civil Rights movement and her childhood was shaped by the turmoil and unrest of the South in the 1960s and ‘70s. [...] Finney’s engagement with political activism has also influenced her trajectory as a poet. Carefully weaving the personal and political, Finney’s poetry is known for its graceful, heartfelt synthesis of the two. Influenced by Lucille Clifton and Nikki Giovanni, Finney’s poems explore subjects ranging from the human devastation of Hurricane Katrina to Rosa Parks to the career path of Condoleezza Rice."
Source: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/nikky-finney
Live Readings
Live Readings
A reading of "Left."
Poems
Poems
The Condoleezza Suite [Excerpt]
Concerto no. 7: Condoleezza {working out} at the WatergateCondoleezza rises at four, stepping on the treadmill.
Her long fingers brace the two slim handlesof accommodating steel.
She steadies her sleepy legs for the long day ahead. She doesn't get very far.
Her knees buckle wanting back last night's dream.
[dream #9]
She is fifteen and leaning forward from the bench, playing Mozart's piano concerto in D minor, alone, before the gawking, disbelieving, applauding crowd.
not [dream #2]
She is nine, and not in the church that explodes into dust, the heart pine floor giving way beneath her friend Denise, rocketing her up into the air like a jack-in-the-boxof a Black girl, wrapped in a Dixie cross.
She ups the speed on the treadmill, remembering, she has to be three times as good.
Don't mix up your dreams Condi.
She runs faster, back to the right, finally hitting her stride. Mozart returns to her side.
She is fifteen again, all smiles, and relocatedto the peaks of the Rocky Mountains,
where she and the Steinwayare the only Black people in the room.
-from Head Off and Split (2011)
Concerto no. 7: Condoleezza {working out} at the WatergateCondoleezza rises at four, stepping on the treadmill.
Her long fingers brace the two slim handlesof accommodating steel.
She steadies her sleepy legs for the long day ahead. She doesn't get very far.
Her knees buckle wanting back last night's dream.
[dream #9]
She is fifteen and leaning forward from the bench, playing Mozart's piano concerto in D minor, alone, before the gawking, disbelieving, applauding crowd.
not [dream #2]
She is nine, and not in the church that explodes into dust, the heart pine floor giving way beneath her friend Denise, rocketing her up into the air like a jack-in-the-boxof a Black girl, wrapped in a Dixie cross.
She ups the speed on the treadmill, remembering, she has to be three times as good.
Don't mix up your dreams Condi.
She runs faster, back to the right, finally hitting her stride. Mozart returns to her side.
She is fifteen again, all smiles, and relocatedto the peaks of the Rocky Mountains,
where she and the Steinwayare the only Black people in the room.
-from Head Off and Split (2011)
Miss Polly Is Akimbo Underneath
Miss Polly Is Akimbo Underneath
the Mother Emanuel* Collection Table
the Mother Emanuel* Collection Table
The one who came to start the next Civil War
speaks to her directly. “Have I shot you yet?”
There is no one else left to answer. In the church
basement all are dead or bleeding out. Miss Polly,
half on her knees, is askew, tilted, her last angle,
akimbo to the eight others who are sprawled and
already spiraling toward heaven. In her mind she
too is about to die. There is no place to hide when
you are the last one facing the waving gun. The air
has been invaded by a poison mix of bright red ore
There is about to be another. He cannot see the
seeping septic colors but she can and there is no
isthmus wide enough, beneath her shield of a table,
to keep her from the current of his non-stop debris.
A floating band of iron orange tincture crooks her
pounding heart but does not push her downstream.
She waits sideways, as high up as she can, refusing
to look at him. She knows how evil can enter through
the iris if beheld too long. She will not be all black
and blue unsure of what has been released in the
room. A river of flaming copper is moving slowly
through her blood. She is an honest woman and
has seen with her own two honest woman eyes,
what hate erupting inside a man can do and what
this one has done. She decides her last words on
this earth will not be camouflaged and khaki,
handed over just before he runs out the same way
he walked in. When he shot the Pastor first she
could have faked it, fallen over sideways, held her
self perfectly still, asked her body to lie for her but
that would not have been the life she has lived. It
will not be the death she dies at his feet. She turns
into the last one standing and her molten answer
arrives, the color of pounded beets, beaten out of
their safe skins, her persimmon words outline every beloved
bullet riddled body still lying on the floor. “No, you have not.”
*The locatino of a mass shooting on June 17, 2015 that occurred in Charleston, South Carolina, in which nine African Americans were killed during a Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Left
Eenee Menee Mainee Mo! —Rudyard Kipling, "A Counting-Out Song,"
in Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides, 1923
The woman with cheerleading legshas been left for dead. She hot paces a roof,four days, three nights, her leaping fingers,helium arms rise & fall, pulling at the week-old baby in the bassinet, pointing to the eighty-two-year-old grandmother, fanning & raspyin the New Orleans Saints folding chair.
Eenee Menee Mainee Mo!
Three times a day the helicopter fliesby in a low crawl. The grandmother insists onnot being helpless, so she waves a white hand-kerchief that she puts on and takes off her headtoward the cameraman and the pilot whoremembers well the art of his mirrored-eyedposture in his low-flying helicopter: Bong Son,Dong Ha, Pleiku, Chu Lai. He makes a slowVietcong dip & dive, a move known in Rescueas the Observation Pass.
The roof is surrounded by broken-leveewater. The people are dark but not broken. Starv-ing, abandoned, dehydrated, brown & cumulous,but not broken. The four-hundred-year-oldanniversary of observation begins, again—
Eenee Menee Mainee Mo! Catch a—
The woman with pom-pom legs wavesher uneven homemade sign:
Pleas Help Pleas
and even if the e has been left off the Pleas e
do you know simply by looking at herthat it has been left offbecause she can't spell(and therefore is not worth saving)or was it because the water was rising so fastthere wasn't time?
Eenee Menee Mainee Mo! Catch a— a—
The low-flying helicopter does not knowthe answer. It catches all this on patriotic tape,but does not land, and does not drop dictionary,or ladder.
Regulations require an e be at the endof any Pleas e before any national responsecan be taken.
Therefore, it takes four days beforethe national council of observers will considerdropping one bottle of water, or one caseof dehydrated baby formula, on the roofwhere the e has rolled off into the flood,
(but obviously not splashedloud enough)
where four days later not the mother,not the baby girl,but the determined hanky waver,whom they were both named for,(and after) has now been covered upwith a green plastic window awning,pushed over to the sideright where the missing e was last seen.
My mother said to pick The very best one!
What else would you call it,Mr. Every-Child-Left-Behind.
Anyone you knowever left off or put onan e by mistake?
Potato Po tato e
In the future observation helicopterswill leave the well-observed South and flyin Kanye-West-Was-Finally-Right formation.They will arrive over burning San Diego.
The fires there will be put out so well.The people there will wait in a civilized manner.And they will receive foie gras and free massagefor all their trouble, while there houses don'tflood, but instead burn calmly to the ground.
The grandmothers were rightabout everything.
People who outlived bullwhips & BullConnor, historically afraid of water and routinelyfed to crocodiles, left in the sun on the sticky tar-heat of roofs to roast like pigs, surrounded byforty feet of churning water, in the summerof 2005, while the richest country in the worldplayed the old observation game, studiedthe situation: wondered by committee what to do;counted, in private, by long historical division;speculated whether or not some people are surelyborn ready, accustomed to flood, famine, fear.
My mother said to pick The very best one And you are not it!
After all, it was only po' New Orleans,old bastard city of funny spellers. Nonswimmerswith squeeze-box accordion accents. Who wouldbe left alive to care?
-from Head Off and Split (2011)
Eenee Menee Mainee Mo! —Rudyard Kipling, "A Counting-Out Song,"
in Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides, 1923
The woman with cheerleading legshas been left for dead. She hot paces a roof,four days, three nights, her leaping fingers,helium arms rise & fall, pulling at the week-old baby in the bassinet, pointing to the eighty-two-year-old grandmother, fanning & raspyin the New Orleans Saints folding chair.
Eenee Menee Mainee Mo!
Three times a day the helicopter fliesby in a low crawl. The grandmother insists onnot being helpless, so she waves a white hand-kerchief that she puts on and takes off her headtoward the cameraman and the pilot whoremembers well the art of his mirrored-eyedposture in his low-flying helicopter: Bong Son,Dong Ha, Pleiku, Chu Lai. He makes a slowVietcong dip & dive, a move known in Rescueas the Observation Pass.
The roof is surrounded by broken-leveewater. The people are dark but not broken. Starv-ing, abandoned, dehydrated, brown & cumulous,but not broken. The four-hundred-year-oldanniversary of observation begins, again—
Eenee Menee Mainee Mo! Catch a—
The woman with pom-pom legs wavesher uneven homemade sign:
Pleas Help Pleas
and even if the e has been left off the Pleas e
do you know simply by looking at herthat it has been left offbecause she can't spell(and therefore is not worth saving)or was it because the water was rising so fastthere wasn't time?
Eenee Menee Mainee Mo! Catch a— a—
The low-flying helicopter does not knowthe answer. It catches all this on patriotic tape,but does not land, and does not drop dictionary,or ladder.
Regulations require an e be at the endof any Pleas e before any national responsecan be taken.
Therefore, it takes four days beforethe national council of observers will considerdropping one bottle of water, or one caseof dehydrated baby formula, on the roofwhere the e has rolled off into the flood,
(but obviously not splashedloud enough)
where four days later not the mother,not the baby girl,but the determined hanky waver,whom they were both named for,(and after) has now been covered upwith a green plastic window awning,pushed over to the sideright where the missing e was last seen.
My mother said to pick The very best one!
What else would you call it,Mr. Every-Child-Left-Behind.
Anyone you knowever left off or put onan e by mistake?
Potato Po tato e
In the future observation helicopterswill leave the well-observed South and flyin Kanye-West-Was-Finally-Right formation.They will arrive over burning San Diego.
The fires there will be put out so well.The people there will wait in a civilized manner.And they will receive foie gras and free massagefor all their trouble, while there houses don'tflood, but instead burn calmly to the ground.
The grandmothers were rightabout everything.
People who outlived bullwhips & BullConnor, historically afraid of water and routinelyfed to crocodiles, left in the sun on the sticky tar-heat of roofs to roast like pigs, surrounded byforty feet of churning water, in the summerof 2005, while the richest country in the worldplayed the old observation game, studiedthe situation: wondered by committee what to do;counted, in private, by long historical division;speculated whether or not some people are surelyborn ready, accustomed to flood, famine, fear.
My mother said to pick The very best one And you are not it!
After all, it was only po' New Orleans,old bastard city of funny spellers. Nonswimmerswith squeeze-box accordion accents. Who wouldbe left alive to care?
-from Head Off and Split (2011)
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