Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/weekly-poem-tonight Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Weekly Poem: ‘Tonight’ Arts Apr 16, 2012 12:13 PM EDT By Rowan Ricardo Phillips In the beginning was this surface. A wall. A beginning. Tonight it coaxed music from a Harlem cloudbank. It freestyled A smoke from a stranger’s coat. It stole thinned gin. It was at the edge of its beginnings but outside Looking in. The lapse-blue facade of Harlem Hospital is weatherstill Like a starlit lake in the midst of Lenox Avenue. Tonight I touched the tattooed skin of the building I was born in And because tonight is curing the beginning let me through. And everywhere was blurring halogen. Love the place that welcomed you. Excerpted from “The Ground” by Rowan Ricardo Phillips, to be published in June 2012 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright 2012 by Rowan Ricardo Phillips. All rights reserved. We're not going anywhere. Stand up for truly independent, trusted news that you can count on! Donate now
By Rowan Ricardo Phillips In the beginning was this surface. A wall. A beginning. Tonight it coaxed music from a Harlem cloudbank. It freestyled A smoke from a stranger’s coat. It stole thinned gin. It was at the edge of its beginnings but outside Looking in. The lapse-blue facade of Harlem Hospital is weatherstill Like a starlit lake in the midst of Lenox Avenue. Tonight I touched the tattooed skin of the building I was born in And because tonight is curing the beginning let me through. And everywhere was blurring halogen. Love the place that welcomed you. Excerpted from “The Ground” by Rowan Ricardo Phillips, to be published in June 2012 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright 2012 by Rowan Ricardo Phillips. All rights reserved. We're not going anywhere. Stand up for truly independent, trusted news that you can count on! Donate now