I went to William Beanes Elementary, where I learned that Beanes was a medical doctor who was captured by the British during the War of 1812. Francis Scott Key went with John Skinner to secure Beanes’s freedom. That trip ended with Key seeing the image of a flag that would become “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In this poem, Nikky Finney is talking about what it means to stop flying some flags. Makes you wonder: How is it a flag can divide and unite a people? And if it does the former, why would we ever argue that it should remain? Selected by Reginald Dwayne Betts
A New Day Dawns
By Nikky Finney
On the occasion of the Confederate flag falling in South Carolina, July 10, 2015
It is pearl-blue peep of day.
All night the palmetto sky
Was seized with the aurora
And alchemy of the remarkable.
A blazing canopy of newly minted
Light fluttered in while we slept.
We are not free to go on as if
Nothing happened yesterday.
Not free to cheer as if all our
Prayers have finally been answered
Today. We are free only to search
The yonder of each other’s faces,
As we pass by, tip our hat, hold a
Door ajar, asking silently,
Who are we now? Blood spilled
In battle is two-headed: horror &
Sweet revelation. Let us put the
Cannons of our eyes away forever.
Our one and only Civil War is done.
Let us tilt, rotate, strut on. If we,
The living, do not give our future
The same honor as the sacred dead,
Of then and now — we lose everything.
The gardenia air feels lighter on this
New day, guided now by iridescent
Fireflies, those atomlike creatures
Of our hot summer nights, now begging
Us to team up and search with them
For that which brightens every
Darkness. Soon, it will be just us
Again, alone, beneath the swirling
Indigo sky of South Carolina. Alone &
Working on the answer to our great
Day’s question: Who are we now?
What new human cosmos can be made
Of this tempest of tears, this upland
Of inconsolable jubilation? In all our
Lifetimes, finally, this towering
Undulating moment is here.
Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet and lawyer. He created the Million Book Project, an initiative to curate microlibraries and install them in prisons across the country. His latest collection of poetry, “Felon,” explores the post-incarceration experience. In 2019, he won a National Magazine Award in Essays and Criticism for his article in The Times Magazine about his journey from teenage carjacker to aspiring lawyer. Nikky Finney is a poet whose latest collection, “Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry,” was published last year by Northwestern University Press. In 2011, she won the National Book Award for Poetry, and in 2020 she earned the Wallace Stevens Award for outstanding artistic achievement. She is the John H. Bennett Jr. Endowed Professor of Creative Writing and Southern Letters at the University of South Carolina.
Illustration by R.O. Blechman
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