And another thing / the grace you brought Othello / how you forged that moor / got him talking down his eloquence as if his tongue wasn't part swan feather / part molasses / how you wrote a church of darkness steepled by Iago / and Ol' Thello its soul / beacon of honor and light / Bruh / that shit literary fire / race-theory brimstone / middle-passage gold
but /
how you played Caliban / his tongue as Othello's / and just as wronged / How you imbibed him with / emblemed him of colonized peoples / got me all riled up / imagining my ancestor's vengeance / a rough blade thrust through Prospero's proud heart / but you didn't / Play ends / Cali still enslaved / Bruh / that shit fucked
—Inua Ellams, "Fuck / Shakespeare," published in Poetry (May 2020). I read this poem for the first time today, while trying to decide what to post for Shakespeare day, and honestly I am obsessed with it now. Like, goddamn.
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