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pauline peters poetry march 2026

– after Malcom


Blackness is my business

Blackness is the fabric of my life.

Blackness is the carpet spread out before me.


I step into the body of my tribe

I claim my brown eyes

my broad nose

my wide lips

my high buttocks

my coiled hair.


They are my inheritance

they are non-negotiable

they are translations from the Black.


(The sun licks my skin for flavour

and finds me good).


Blackness teaches me song 

I dance it

Blackness teaches me love

I birth it

Blackness teaches me silence

I hear it. 


My blackness is a witness

There is nothing like my Blackness.


My Blackness has given

the family of lions its name

The name of my Blackness

is pride.


the altar of music

when i was god-thirsty

she loved me like water

cool in my throat


tonic of a woman

song of a woman

a sweet, cool liquid

spirit of a woman


her horse was the colour of music

dancing and pied

strutting and tossing

legs swift as fire

its neigh a melody


“i heard a low sound,” she said

“i thought it was your voice

 but it was a violin”


“i thought i saw you fleeing,” she said

“a swift dark animal,

 but it was a running deer.”


with gentle, intelligent fingers

she pried me apart like

segments of a fruit


then sang me into being

so that the earth

dark and plush as velvet

could claim and restore me


holding out a hand to raise me

she unlocked the music with a slow key

in all the houses of my heart


melodies caught in my hair

i stood in my grace


“when you need me, she said, “come,”

“come to the altar of music.”


Pauline Peters is a queer African-Canadian writer living in Tkoronto, on the territory of the Dish With One Spoon peoples. She has been published in Room, The Fiddlehead, PRISM international, Prairie Fire, The Malahat Review, Decolonial Passage, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, The Salted Woman, was published in Britain by Hedgespoken Press and her work was included in Best Canadian Poetry 2025.

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Pauline peters poetry september 2024

i.

to the beautiful, flexible gods

amenable and fluid,

to all the gods warped and wefted

on a loom with common thread,

to the clay gods shaped and curved and smoothed,

holding the fullness of grain,

to all the cool gods of fresh running water.

to all the shining gods of lucent, precious stone,

to all the masks of gods danced barefoot in the dust,

to all the gods whose name means: “I am singing the river,”

to the gods of the long and sinuous song.

and always to the gods who look out from the center of your eyes,

and to all the shining gods of air and light and breath,

and then, at last, to the irresistible gods of stillness and silence and death


ii.

the old gods sleep beneath the earth, the very ground is their mantle.

yearly they rise, dream-thick, rubbing sleep from their far-seeing eyes.

they shake the heavy red clay out of their dark, kinked, hair,

wearing nothing but tangled red stories girded around their loins.

we approach them and lay down the sweet-smelling grass,

we offer trays of honey, sweet pomegranates, and wine.

they dine and then they listen, grim, with sympathetic ears –

there is so little time and soon they will slip beneath the earth again.

how do we offer up our prayers and fears?

how do we wear our sadness?

will we burn? and will the Earth?

will water rain down to save us?

is it too late? and is it too late?

is it now forever too late?


Headcount

I was not born, I was fashioned in a furnace by the hand of a smith.

I was beaten black, fire my cradle, the blazing foundry my home.

I was wrought with the strength of his muscled, ashen arm,

his forehead creased and sweat-drowned, me, the dark tool of his making.

Laminar and ductile I was shaped, pliable, easy to use.


But when worn out by his labours, the ironsmith sleeps abyssal,

my black-winged soul rises, tracing a pattern across the sky.


It touches down shadow-soft to peck at the night-wet grass,

foraging for ground news, of those lives still caught,

imprisoned and chained, tied to the heat of the forge,

and those fleeing with desperate breath, straining for winged flight.


Pauline Peters is a queer African-Canadian writer living in Toronto, the territory of Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples. Her poems investigate themes of race, myth, ancestry, spirituality, and nature. Her aim is to create poems whose themes combine to create a holistic expression. Her work has been published in The Fiddlehead, PRISM international, Prairie Fire, The Malahat Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, The Salted Woman, was published in Britain by Hedgespoken Press. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has work forthcoming in Best Canadian Poetry 2025.