Tracy K. Smith (b. 1972) is an African American poet and professor of creative writing at Princeton University. Born in Massachusetts, she received a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. She is the author of three award-winning books of poetry—The Body’s Question (2003), Duende (2007), and Life on Mars (2011), which won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Letter to a Photojournalist Going-In

“Letter to a Photojournalist Going-In” appeared in Smith’s second collection, Duende, published in 2007.

You go to the pain. City after city. Borders

Where they peer into your eyes as if to erase you.

You go by bus or truck, days at a time, just taking it

When they throw you in a room or kick at your gut,

5

Taking it when a strong fist hammers person after person

A little deeper into the ground. Your camera blinks:

Soldiers smoking between rounds. Bodies

Blown open like curtains. In the neighborhoods,

Boys brandish plastic guns with TV bravado. Men

10

Ask you to look them in the face and say who’s right.

At night you sleep, playing it all back in reverse:

The dance of wind in a valley of dirt. Rugs and tools,

All the junk that rises up, resurrected, then disappears

Into newly formed windows and walls. People

15

Close their mouths and run backwards out of frame.

Up late, your voice fits my ear like a secret.

But who can hear two things at once?

Errant stars flare, shatter. A whistle, then the indescribable thud

Of an era spilling its matter into the night. Who can say the word love

20

When everything—everything—pushes back with the promise

To grind itself to dust?

And what if there’s no dignity to what we do,

None at all? If our work—what you see, what I say—is nothing

But a way to kid ourselves into thinking we might last? If trust is just

25

Another human trick that’ll lick its lips and laugh as it backs away?

Sometimes I think you’re right, wanting to lose everything and wander

Like a blind king. Wanting to squeeze a lifetime between your hands

And press it into a single flimsy frame. Will you take it to your lips

Like the body of a woman, something to love in passing,

30

Or set it down, free finally, empty as the camera,

Which we all know is just a hollow box, mechanized to obey?

Sometimes I want my heart to beat like yours: from the outside in,

A locket stuffed with faces that refuse to be named. For time

To land at my feet like a grenade.

(2007)