Good Hair
- Good Hair
Only God, my dear,Could love you for yourself aloneAnd not your yellow hair.
—W. B. Yeats, “For Anne Gregory”
Sister, there was nothing left for us.Down here, this cast-off hour, we listenedbut heard no voices in the shells. No beauty.
Our lives already tangled in the violence of our hair,we learned to feel unwanted in the sea’s blue gaze,knowing even the blond lichen was considered lovely.
Not us, who combed and tamed ourselves at dawn,cursing every brute animal in its windy mane—God forbid all that good hair being grown to waste.
Barber, I can say a true thing or I can say nothing;meet you in the canerows with my crooked English,coins with strange faces stamped deep inside my palm,
ask to be remodeled with castaway hair, or draggedby my scalp through your hot comb. The mirror takesand the mirror takes. I’ve waded there and waited in vanity;
paid the toll to watch my wayward roots foam white,drugstore formaldehyde burning through my skin.For good hair I’d do anything. Pay the price of dignity,
send virgins in India to daily harvest; their milesof glittering hair sold for thousands in the street.Still we come to them yearly with our copper coins, [End Page 47]
whole nights spent on our knees, our prayers whisperedear to ear, hoping to wake with soft unfurling curls,black waves parting strands of honey.
But how were we to know our poverty?That our mother’s good genes would only come to weeds,that I would squander all her mulatta luck.
This nigger-hair my biggest malady.So thick it holds a pencil up. [End Page 48]
Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Her first full-length collection, Cannibal, won the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry (University of Nebraska Press, 2016). She is the recipient of a 2016 Whiting Writers’ Award, the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, the Nation, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. Sinclair received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Virginia and is currently a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California.
