Poet's Choice

Now that Barack Obama is the nominee and has met his former opponent in Unity, N.H., it seems proper to introduce Terrance Hayes, a modest young genius whose poems evoke the kind of unity Obama is angling for. Hayes didn't grow up in any mythic "post-racial" America, but his high school was integrated, and his South lacked the colored water fountains I was yanked away from as a girl. Hayes's poems enact the new race struggle, more up-to-date than the pre-civil rights poems of his lit'rary ancestors (Langston Hughes, say), but equally instructive to this white reader.

Talk

like a nigger now, my white friend, M, said

after my M.L.K. and Ronald Reagan impersonations,

the two of us alone and shirtless in the locker room,

and if you're thinking my knuckles knocked

a few times against his jaw or my fingers knotted

at his throat, you're wrong because I pretended

I didn't hear him, and when he didn't ask it again,

we slipped into our middle school uniforms

since it was November, the beginning

of basketball season, and jogged out

onto the court to play together