When I
die
I’m sure
I will have a
Big Funeral…
Curiosity
seekers…
coming to see
if I
am really
Dead…
or just
trying to make
Trouble…
– Mari E. Evans
Postscript:
Troublemakers of the world, let this be what you aim for.
This is a poem I can’t read without smiling – simple and elegant, its narrator having a morbidly amusing voice. If you like this, also read Let Me Die a Youngman’s Death.
Mari Evans is a well known African-American poet and part of the Black Arts movement. Read more about her here.
Tagged: dark humor, death, Mari E. Evans, unsettling
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[…] E. Evans Epigraph: I first read Evans in an anthology called Sounds and Silences, a poem called The Rebel. I remember laughing out loud at the audacity, the humor and the subversiveness of it. I definitely […]
2 Comments
I have a question: Does the March 13, 2011 publishing date apply to when it was “published” on this site? Because I read this back in the very early 1970’s and the darned thing just stuck with me all these years and I finally had to look it up. It was in a general collection of African American poems and I was in high school. I just wondered what the 2011 date referred to, as this is definitely the poem and the author and in a book by the early 70’s.
Thanks
Janet
Hi Janet, thanks for dropping a comment. The date on the page is just from when it was posted to this website. Sorry about the confusion!