Thylias Moss

My ancestors weren’t hippies, cotton precluded fascination with flowers. I don’t remember communes, I remember ghettos. The riots were real, not products of hallucinogens. Free love had been at Redbones since black unemployment and credit saturation. The white women my mother cleaned for didn’t notice she had changed. I guess it was a small event, a resurrected African jumping out the gap in her front teeth. I guess it looked like a cockroach; that’s what she was supposed to have, not dignity.

Ahead of Martin Luther King Jr. Day — which is observed on Jan. 21 this year — poet Richard Blanco shared some of his favorite works engaging with King's life and legacy. Blanco is the nation's fifth presidential inaugural poet and author, most recently, of the collaboration "Boundaries." Blanco read his poem "St. Louis: Prayer Before Dawn," which discusses the social, political and economic disparities between two St. Louis neighborhoods, one predominantly white, and one predominantly black.

Snow got you down? Maybe poetry can help—or, at the least, if you live in the part of the United States pummeled by snowstorms over the past few weeks, maybe the poets can bring you back to aspects of snow that aren’t about plows or school closings. “Snow is to water what poetry is to prose,” writes the historian Bernard Mergen in Snow in America.