Queer Poem-a-Day is a program from the Adult Services Department at the Library and may include adult language.
Charm
by Nikky Finney
The two of them
standing on the other side
of the airport window,
Mama wiping her eyes
and looking through her purse
for anything of hers
to lastly give.
Daddy with his hands
one hundred leagues deep
in his salty pockets,
his black pearls
already secretly handed over
earlier in the day.
The way they stand there
with nowhere else
to go or be,
two watchlights watching
until the last of me
is all the way out of sight.
Nobody waits like this anymore,
nobody loves this way anymore.
Copyright © 2003 by Nikky Finney. This poem was originally published in The World is Round (InnerLight Publishing, 2003.)
About the Author
Nikky Finney is the author of On Wings Made of Gauze; Rice; The World Is Round; and Head Off & Split, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2011. Her new collection of poems, Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry, was released in 2020. Finney is Carolina Distinguished Professor at USC in Columbia where she is also Director of the Ernest A. Finney Jr. Cultural Arts Center.
Queer Poem a Day
Queer Poem-a-Day is founded and co-directed by poet and professor Lisa Hiton and Dylan Zavagno, Adult Services Coordinator at the Library and host of the Deerfield Public Library Podcast. Music for this fifth year of our series is “L’Ange Verrier” from Le Rossignol Éperdu by Reynaldo Hahn, performed by pianist Daniel Baer. Queer Poem-a-Day is supported by generous donations from the Friends of the Deerfield Public Library and the Deerfield Fine Arts Commission.
