☀ What Sparks Poetry: Readers Write Back

April 14, 2025

What Sparks Poetry is a series of original essays that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In our new series, Readers Write Back, we asked our readers which poem, of all those we’ve published in our last seven years, has moved them most. Each Monday's delivery brings you a poem and an excerpt from the essay.

For a Bail Denied

Reginald Dwayne Betts

for A.S.

I won’t tell you how it ended, &
his mother won’t, either, but beside
me she stood & some things neither

of us could know, & now, all is lost;
lost is all in what came after—the kid,
& we should call him kid, call him a

child, his face smooth & without history
of a razor, he shuffled—ghostly—into
court, & let’s just call it a cauldron, &

admit his nappy head made him blacker
than whatever pistol he’d held,
whatever solitary awaited; the prosecutor’s

bald head was black or brown (but
when has brown not been akin to Black
here? to abyss?) & does it matter,

Black lives, when all he said of Black
boys was that they kill?—the child beside
his mother & his mother beside me &

I am not his father, just a public
defender, near starving, here, where the
state turns men, women, children into

numbers, seeking something more useful
than a guilty plea & this boy beside
me’s withering, on the brink of life &

broken, & it’s all possible, because the
judge spoke & the kid says
—I did it I mean I did it I mean Jesus—

someone wailed & the boy’s mother yells:
This ain’t justice. You can’t throw my son
into that fucking ocean. She meant jail.

& we was powerless to stop it.
& too damn tired to be beautiful.

from the book FELON / W. W. Norton & Company

READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM

Color cover image from Reginald Dwayne Bates book, Felon

What Sparks Poetry:
Readers Write Back

"As an educator in a juvenile detention center, this poem speaks to the abyss my students and their families must navigate. This poem identifies how young people of color become forgotten numbers in the incarceration system. I am haunted by the intangible process of children entering the justice system as vulnerable humans seeking guidance, opportunity, even forgiveness—only to find themselves in a repeating cycle of court → detention→ home. This poem expresses my desire for the justice system to give kiddos 'something more useful than a guilty plea' because they are all 'on the brink of life and broken.'"

Jess Finley

READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE

Composite photograph of a smiling Stephanie Burt and the cover image of her new anthology, Super Gay Poems

Stephanie Burt on Super Gay Poems, Her New Anthology

"I knew I wanted international, regional, and stylistic and formal and tonal, as well as demographic, variety. But I also knew that I had to read around, especially for poems published before about 1998 and for poems published only outside the U.S. Some of my favorite discoveries: the Melvin Dixon poem, which ought to have entered all the anthologies immediately upon publication—it’s so perfect and so sad!—and the Cherry Smyth poem, one of only two really good poems I know about queer abusive relationships."

via HARVARD MAGAZINE

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