Chosen by Constance Keefer

Faculty, Brazelton Touchpoints Center and Brazelton Institute
Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School
Associate in Medicine, Boston Children’s Hospital
Active Medical Staff, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston

While the timing for this poem this month is very appropriate, I believe, and even hope, that this issue, in a word - racism - will be an appropriate topic now and into the future, until some real change is wrought.

“‘When Night Fills with Premature Exits’ was inspired by a meditation on Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet and the idea that Black people cannot conceive a world, even a different planet, where they are not feared. The ‘premature exits’ referred to in the title echo a lifelong sentiment that we die at too fast and at too high of a rate, especially as Black men, because we are not deemed worthy of being free or carefree and because those who target us, as Claudia Rankine eloquently puts it, have a hard time policing their imagination. The poem is written in the form of questions because I am on a daily quest for the answers myself, especially as the father of two beautifully radiant sons. I wanted to express the deeply rooted exasperation and exhaustion that comes with always trying to live and build a life in the gurgle of goodbyes.”

—Enzo Silon Surin