Poem by Arthur L. Jenkins: The Ache of Endurance

Poet’s Statement

“The Ache of Endurance” is a lament for Black men living under the weight of societal expectation and historic injustice. I wrote it to confront the silence and stigma surrounding Black male mental health, while also speaking directly to the generational burdens carried in both body and spirit. It is about what it means to be seen as strong while being denied the right to be vulnerable. It is about how survival becomes its own quiet form of grief.

Each stanza moves through time and space—from inherited trauma to present-day systems of neglect, from spiritual longing to systemic abandonment. The figures in the poem—sons, fathers, brothers—are shaped by the pressures of race, gender, and poverty, caught in a cultural performance of strength that leaves no room for collapse. The images are raw: hands in prayer, dimmed light, laughter twisted by desperation. These aren’t just metaphors—they’re lived experiences.

This poem is also rooted in specific historical memory. The reference to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study isn’t anecdotal—it’s a symbol of medical betrayal that still reverberates through Black communities today. The mention of inaccessible therapy speaks to the real, persistent barriers to care: financial, cultural, psychological.

As a poet, I feel a responsibility to testify—to use language to make visible what society often silences. “The Ache of Endurance” does not offer neat answers. It holds space for contradiction, for sorrow, for the desperate beauty of simply continuing. It asks: what does it cost to endure, and who are we when the world only allows us to survive?

Poem: The Ache of Endurance by Arthur L. Jenkins

“The Ache of Endurance”

Little boys with polished skin of mahogany,

chained to their race beneath the curse of hegemony.

A seed planted deep in the grasping ground,

unseen, rigid and small – buried, untouched, unfound.

Having strength with centuries of oppression,

stoic and self-reliant, yet masculinity festers with depression.

“Cut all that nonsense out,” they say. “Be a man,”

men walk through their arduous paths the best they can.

Hardened hands folded kneeling in prayers,

in their hearts they lose faith due to naysayers.

The dimmed light falls upon their heads,

their weaknesses buried deep in what remains unsaid.

Tethered to a wife, a father responsible for his child,

a brother to all, loses his mind to the wild.

Frantic laughter comes as fevered gesticulations,

each strenuous dance, a step to sorrow’s revelations.

Fleeting emotions may be swift and with violence,

criminalized by law – stripped of all defense.

The memory of murder by cops cast down like a shadow,

recalling traumas like barren landscapes in a bleak meadow.

History casts the doctor as the greatest Black man’s foe,

the Tuskegee Syphilis Study we’ve come to know.

A therapist who cannot understand his culture,

sets the stage for resistance eating away like a vulture.

Golden coins finance the keys to his mind’s freedom,

walls of poverty deny access so he can’t fathom.

Struggling to hold the weight of his burden,

         his truth lies in a fog – shifting, uncertain.

Drowning his illnesses with street medicine,

         he knows he is not the cause of the original sin.           

Death by despair happens to these men in silence,

we no longer feel fear, just the ache of endurance.