Langston Hughes's "One-Way Ticket" is a paradigmatic migration narrative poem, capturing the specific urgency and emotional complexity of Black Southerners' decision to leave the South, the combination of hope, fear, grief, and determination in a single act of departure; A student poet writing a migration narrative might interview a grandparent or great-grandparent about their experience of the Great Migration, using the specific details of that story as the basis for a poem that connects individual biography to collective history; Gwendolyn Brooks's Bronzeville poems represent the destination end of the migration narrative, exploring what became of the communities that the Great Migration built in northern cities, the disappointments, achievements, and transformations of that collective journey; A contemporary poet might write a migration narrative about internal displacement within cities, the gentrification-driven migration of Black communities from historically Black neighborhoods to more distant suburbs, exploring how this contemporary movement rhymes with and differs from the historical Great Migration; The migration narrative has a counterpart in the return migration story, and a poet might write about the reverse journey, elderly Black Southerners returning to die in the landscapes they left as young people, exploring what it means to complete a circle whose departure was marked by terror and whose return is marked by a different kind of longing; Isabel Wilkerson's "The Warmth of Other Suns" contains dozens of individual migration narratives that could serve as the basis for poetic adaptations, allowing student poets to work with specific documented histories while developing their own interpretive and formal responses