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The JRB presents an updated version of an essay first published in Jim Pascual Agustin's book of poems

Bloodred Dragonflies: New and Selected Poems in English and Versions from the Filipino
Jim Pascual Agustin
Deep South, 2022

Bloodred Dragonflies: New and Selected Poems in English and Versions from the Filipino.
Various Histories

The Philippines, my country of birth, is an archipelago of over seven thousand islands, so taking to the water has been a necessity and a skill among its inhabitants. Its geographic location made it a natural trading post in the Pacific long before the first Europeans arrived in their galleons. It also sits on major earthquake fault lines and is part of the chain of active volcanoes around Asia known as the Ring of Fire. Typhoons regularly visit the country, often leaving huge devastation.

The Philippines has had a long list of invaders through the centuries. The colonial empire of Spain ruled with cross and sword for over three hundred years. The United States of America, in its roughly fifty years of domination, introduced the public education system along with torture and genocide. Japan staked its bayonets for three years during World War II.

In the late eighteen-nineties, Philippine revolutionaries were fighting to put an end to Spanish rule. The Spanish knew they no longer had the power to keep the country, but they could not admit defeat to people they deemed to be unworthy opponents. America was waiting at the doorstep, laying the foundations for its young empire. It earned the trust of revolutionary leaders by promising to support their new government. A mock battle was staged in Manila Bay in May 1898 between the two colonial powers with Spain 'surrendering' to the Americans. But within months this became reality when the Treaty of Paris was signed, declaring Spain's defeat and the agreement to sell the Philippines for $20 million to the USA.

It was in those turbulent years that Filipino crew members on trade ships passing the coast of Cape Town decided to abandon their posts and stay ashore. They established the first fishing community in Kalk Bay. When I first got here I thought I would be the first Filipino to set foot in South Africa. Much later I learned how inaccurate that was.

I arrived in South Africa in October 1994 knowing only one person. I had met her on my first trip to the Mountain Province in the Philippines in 1993. She was on holiday from teaching English in Japan. She did not have the luckiest time in Manila, losing her travellers cheques soon after arriving. Someone suggested she go up north. We were both trying to catch a bus from Banaue (home of famous rice terraces) that would take us to Bontoc and Sagada. The bus was already full of locals, so we ended up riding on the roof for the hours-long drive on narrow roads right next to cliffs. Being the monsoon season, the roads were slippery with mud and we were told a number of times to jump off the side away from the sheer drop below if the vehicle began to tilt. The shared adventure brought us together. She came back to live with me in Manila the following year, then I followed her to South Africa.

I didn't know back then that Cape Town would become my home. Each time a stranger approached me-often not in a friendly way-they assumed I was from somewhere else. My appearance somehow drew anti-Chinese remarks. To those who showed real interest rather than veiled animosity, I tried to explain where I came from by identifying nearby countries like Thailand and Malaysia.

***

I lost both grandfathers when I was very young. I remember very little about them. My mother's father lived in a room upstairs that had wide windows made of capiz -translucent, flattish shells from a particular type of oyster, cut to fit small squares in a wooden grid. I remember light coming in even when he shut those windows. He had a violin in the corner of the room, but he never took it out of the case. He had been a young widower taking care of three daughters and a son during the Japanese invasion in World War II. There are photographs of me as a toddler sitting in his lap, a rare smile for the camera. He barely spoke to us, but with a single shout he would send the neighbours' kids running, dropping the guavas they tried to steal.

My father would have gone to university on a scholarship for his soccer playing abilities, but he had to support the studies of his younger sister. Military service seemed a good option, so he joined the Philippine Air Force. When he got called to duty, he would disappear for days. We were never told to where, for what. He claimed he was related to the Marcoses, coming from the same province in the north, and that they shared a middle name.

My mother was a public school teacher. She got up at five each morning to prepare food for the whole family before setting off on foot to the local primary school. Many years after she retired, her former students would visit our house with Christmas offerings, sometimes with their young families in tow.

My parents were active members of a local community organisation which called itself 'Land for the Landless'-people who put up their own houses and looked after their own needs on land outside the reach of government services. It was a rural area on the outskirts of Manila with rice fields and small vegetable farms by the river.

We lived in a house that had been expanded many times through the decades to accommodate our extended family. Rooms were added or split up with thin dividers, sometimes just with blankets. Cousins and their own growing families somehow managed to make space. The whole house was a patchwork, with new wood nailed against thick old trunks.

In the late nineteen-seventies, the Marcoses wanted to build a highway, naming it after the dictator. Our house stood in the way, as did most of the houses in the community. One day huge machinery arrived, dumping mountains of soil and gravel. My family was paid a measly sum and given a short deadline to move out. The top part of our house was lifted off its base by volunteers and loaded onto the back of a truck which took it a few kilometres down to a new spot. At one point it got stuck on a low hanging power cable. One of the neighbours climbed to the roof to deal with it. He got electrocuted and was rushed to the hospital. Relatives took over our house in that new location, and my family moved to another part of town. Soon grey concrete roads buried the remaining rice paddies in the area. In the regime of Ferdinand E Marcos the Philippines, once South East Asia's economic wonder, became the country with the worst foreign debt record in the region.

When martial law was declared in 1972, I was a toddler. Curfews remained in force as I grew up-the hushed talk of the adults about protests, arrests and disappearances went on for many years. My parents were Marcos loyalists, the quiet type who didn't join campaign rallies and believed every word from the government-controlled media. The Marcos family and their cronies took over major businesses and independent media entities. They buried the population in debt while putting on an extravagant show of wealth. The military crushed all dissent and resistance. In 1983 the assassination of Ninoy Aquino, the staunchest critic of the regime, galvanised the opposition. There were protest rallies in different parts of the country, even in the conservative business districts.

Marcos declared there would be snap elections in early February 1986, to prove to the country that he remained popular. Cory Aquino, the widow of Ninoy, became the unlikely candidate for the opposition. My mother, like all public school teachers, was required to work at the polls. As she oversaw the manual counting of ballots which went on through the night, she knew that the Marcos administration had lost. It made her cry in disbelief. In many parts of the country there were reports of violence at the polls, of election officials resisting armed men who wanted to snatch ballot boxes.

During the national counting of votes it became clear the Marcos regime had tried to rig the elections. Cory Aquino called for nationwide civil disobedience. Former military supporters of Marcos declared a coup to oust him, and the Catholic Church sent out a call for people to protect them. Huge numbers responded, filling the major streets and highways of the capital. Fighter jets were sent to threaten them. Tanks rolled down the streets, but people blocked them with their own bodies. The few soldiers who still supported Marcos had running battles with the soldiers who had joined the coup. The military was ordered to fire at the protesters-they refused. Although under siege, the Marcoses declared victory and used state television to broadcast a flag-waving event, but within hours they were airlifted from the presidential palace by US Forces and taken to Hawaii. Soon afterwards, protesters broke through the gates. The groundswell of popular support swept Cory Aquino to the presidency in what would be called the 1986 People Power Revolution.

School was called off just before the elections. I was a high school student then, awkward and out of place in the exclusive Ateneo de Manila, run by Jesuits, where I had been accepted on a financial scholarship. Some of my classmates had joined rallies. I never dared. But in February 1986, I took a jeepney as far as I could, then went on foot to join thousands of people ambling about on EDSA, the widest road in Manila, as if they were in a fiesta. I walked with them for hours, past buildings pitted with bullet holes, and corners where flowers and rosaries had been offered to soldiers.

I couldn't tell my family where I'd been. My father finally came home after being holed up in the military base. He was incensed because he had to buy yellow ribbons (the colour of the opposition) and tie them to his vehicle to be let through the crowds. He and my mother wept together. In the space of a few days he had lost all his authority. During martial law anyone could get picked up by a soldier or a lowly police officer for the slightest reason. Growing up with a father in the military gave my family a sense of protection. He was often called upon by relatives to help get someone out of trouble.

Under the Marcos regime all senior high school and first year university students were required to undergo citizens military training. We were told we could be called to serve any time to fight the growing insurgency. The new government that took over didn't remove this policy. I had no money to buy army boots. I got hand-me-downs, two sizes too big. I had to wear thick socks and fold them over. I broke my ankle once running with those oversized boots. We had drills every Saturday morning until noon. One time we were ordered to be at a military base to learn to fire a rifle. That day my best friend got kicked in the side by one of the soldiers for laughing when we were supposed to be aiming at targets.

After the death in exile of the former dictator, the Marcos family were allowed to return to the country. They refused to return the funds they had stolen while they were in power. They never recognised nor apologised for the human rights abuses committed under the dictatorship. They regained their foothold in politics in both local and national elections.

The outgoing president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, elected in 2016, is facing possible arrest by the International Criminal Court for his so-called War on Drugs during which between seven-thousand and thirty-thousand have been killed-not just accused drug users but also political and environmental activists, indigenous people, lawyers, mayors, church leaders, and journalists. Before he came to power, the country had seen an economic boom under the leadership of the son of Cory Aquino, Benigno Aquino Jr. All those gains were squandered by the rampant corruption that Duterte and his officials orchestrated.

Jim Pascual Agustin had published ten books of poetry in Filipino and English-in the Philippines and the UK-by the time his first South African title, Bloodred Dragonflies, was released in 2022 by Deep South. Minimal Press is due to publish a South Africa edition of an earlier collection, Sound Before Water, while two new collections are forthcoming: Blur of a Dog (San Anselmo Press, Manila) and Waking Up to the Pattern Left by a Snail Overnight, winner of the 2022 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize. He has been invited to present the book at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Seattle in 2023, but his attendance depends on the success of a crowdfunding initiative that is being handled by the fantastic Tracey Saunders.

In early 2022, just as this book was being printed, the former dictator's son, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, was running for president. His main opponent was Leni Robredo, who, like Cory Aquino, is the widow of a prominent political leader. Robredo had previously beaten Marcos Jr when they both ran for vice president of the country. She promised to end impunity and corruption.

***

A few weeks before the 9 May 2022 elections I spoke to some friends in Manila who were among the millions volunteering their time and money for Leni Robredo's campaign. A new kind of energy was sweeping the country-hundreds of thousands of people, millions possibly, were attending Robredo's rallies. Crowds showing kindness and solidarity, singing both campaign songs and pop songs even as they walked back home. And not just in the capital, in the provinces as well. There was a deluge of creativity-murals on public and private walls, books, artwork, poetry, songs, handmade posters.

I asked one of my friends if the results could be manipulated. He said 'They wouldn't dare. It's unstoppable now, just look at all the rallies!'

But they did dare. On election day improbable figures flooded social media at regular intervals, spread by paid online trolls. Within days Marcos Jr was declared president and Duterte's daughter was declared vice-president.

The final report from the UN's International Observer Mission concluded: 'The Philippine Elections 2022, especially the Presidential, Senatorial and House of Representatives elections, including for the 20 per cent Party-List seats, failed to meet the international standard of a free, honest and fair election.'

The report was completely ignored by the authorities in the Philippines. Protests were quickly quashed by the outgoing regime. Evidence such as SD cards were erased, and there was an unexplained fire at the offices of the Commission on Elections. Demands for a manual recount were silenced.

Leni Robredo never conceded defeat. She also did not file to contest the declared results. Instead she announced the founding of Angat Buhay (Life Upliftment), a new NGO which drew on the huge volunteer network that supported her campaign. It will continue what she started while she was the country's vice-president-helping calamity-affected communities, providing housing, setting up feeding schemes for children, making free medical assistance available to those in need.

Meanwhile more books, poetry, and songs continue to be written from the creativity and renewed hope that sprang up during the campaign. The people have not given up hope. They know that no meaningful change can come from those who seek only power.

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'No meaningful change can come from those who seek only power'-Read 'Various Histories', an essay by Jim Pascual Agustin

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The JRB presents an updated version of an essay first published in Jim Pascual Agustin's book of poems Bloodred Dragonflies: New and Selected Poems in English and Versions from the Filipino. Bloodred Dragonflies: New and Selected Poems in English and Versions from the FilipinoJim Pascual Agus

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No one's allowed to tell
their sad story at my funeral.
No one's allowed to tell
my sad story at my funeral.
There must be cocaine.
Talk shit about all the people
I hated. I'll still hate them
(probably even more when I'm dead).
Play Lou Reed's "Perfect Day"
on repeat. Don't cry.
Don't be embarrassing.
It's not a good song
to do drugs to so after
play Fleetwood and take
a Xanax. Rent a room
overlooking Central Park
and get more drugs.
Invite strangers up.
Don't return desperate
texts from people who
hound you because
they're boring.
Just think about me.
Think of New York.
How the people who
never liked me never
liked me because they
always assumed I was
having too much fun.
And you know what?
I was. I loved being alive.

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No one's allowed to tell their sad story at my funeral. No one's allowed to tell my sad story at my funeral. There must be cocaine. Talk shit about all the people I hated. I'll still hate them (probably even more when I'm dead). Play Lou Reed's "Perfect Day" on repeat.

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Dana Henry Martin lives in Utah. They're a poet, writer, weaver, and activist

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It's the ragged source of memory,
a tarpaper-shingled bungalow
whose floors tilt toward the porch,
whose back yard ends abruptly
in a weedy ravine. Nothing special:
a chain of three bedrooms
and a long side porch turned parlor
where my great-grandfather, Pomp, smoked
every evening over the news,
a long sunny kitchen
where Annie, his wife,
measured cornmeal,
dreaming through the window
across the ravine and up to Shelby Hill
where she had borne their spirited,
high-yellow brood.

In the middle bedroom's hard,
high antique double bed,
the ghost of Aunt Jane,
the laundress
who bought the house in 1872,
though I call with all my voices,
does not appear.
Nor does Pomp's ghost,
with whom one of my cousins believes
she once had a long and intimate
unspoken midnight talk.
He told her, though they'd never met,
that he loved her; promised
her raw widowhood would heal
without leaving a scar.

The conveniences in an enclosed corner
of the slant-floored back side porch
were the first indoor plumbing in town.
Aunt Jane put them in,
incurring the wrath of the woman
who lived in the big house next door.
Aunt Jane left the house
to Annie, whose mother she had known
as a slave on the plantation,
so Annie and Pomp could move their children
into town, down off Shelby Hill.
My grandmother, her brother, and five sisters
watched their faces change slowly
in the oval mirror on the wall outside the door
into teachers' faces, golden with respect.
Here Geneva, the randy sister,
damned their colleges,
daubing her quicksilver breasts
with gifts of perfume.

As much as love,
as much as a visit
to the grave of a known ancestor,
the homeplace moves me not to silence
but the righteous, praise Jesus song:

Oh, catfish and turnip greens,
hot-water cornbread and grits.
Oh, musty, much-underlined Bibles;
generations lost to be found,
to be found.

The Lutherans sit stolidly in rows;
only their children feel the holy ghost
that makes them jerk and bobble and almost
destroys the pious atmosphere for those
whose reverence bows their backs as if in work.
The congregation sits, or stands to sing,
or chants the dusty creeds automaton.
Their voices drone like engines, on and on,
and they remain untouched by everything;
confession, praise, or likewise, giving thanks.
The organ that they saved years to afford
repeats the Sunday rhythms song by song,
slow lips recite the credo, smother yawns,
and ask forgiveness for being so bored.

I, too, am wavering on the edge of sleep,
and ask myself again why I have come
to probe the ruins of this dying cult.
I come bearing the cancer of my doubt
as superstitious suffering women come
to touch the magic hem of a saint's robe.

Yet this has served two centuries of men
as more than superstitious cant; they died
believing simply. Women, satisfied
that this was truth, were racked and burned with them
for empty words we moderns merely chant.

We sing a spiritual as the last song,
and we are moved by a peculiar grace
that settles a new aura on the place.
This simple melody, though sung all wrong,
captures exactly what I think is faith.
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
That slaves should suffer in his agony!
That Christian, slave-owning hypocrisy
nevertheless was by these slaves ignored
as they pitied the poor body of Christ!
Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble,
that they believe most, who so much have lost.
To be a Christian one must bear a cross.
I think belief is given to the simple
as recompense for what they do not know.

I sit alone, tormented in my heart
by fighting angels, one group black, one white.
The victory is uncertain, but tonight
I'll lie awake again, and try to start
finding the black way back to what we've lost.

Which reminds me of another knock-on-wood
memory. I was cycling with a male friend,
through a small midwestern town. We came to a 4-way
stop and stopped, chatting. As we started again,
a rusty old pick-up truck, ignoring the stop sign,
hurricaned past scant inches from our front wheels.
My partner called, "Hey, that was a 4-way stop!"
The truck driver, stringy blond hair a long fringe
under his brand-name beer cap, looked back and yelled,
          "You fucking niggers!"
And sped off.
My friend and I looked at each other and shook our heads.
We remounted our bikes and headed out of town.
We were pedaling through a clear blue afternoon
between two fields of almost-ripened wheat
bordered by cornflowers and Queen Anne's lace
when we heard an unmuffled motor, a honk-honking.
We stopped, closed ranks, made fists.
It was the same truck. It pulled over.
A tall, very much in shape young white guy slid out:
greasy jeans, homemade finger tattoos, probably
a Marine Corps boot-camp footlockerful
of martial arts techniques.

"What did you say back there!" he shouted.
My friend said, "I said it was a 4-way stop.
You went through it."
"And what did I say?" the white guy asked.
"You said: 'You fucking niggers.'"
The afternoon froze.

"Well," said the white guy,
shoving his hands into his pockets
and pushing dirt around with the pointed toe of his boot,
"I just want to say I'm sorry."
He climbed back into his truck
and drove away.

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It's the ragged source of memory, a tarpaper-shingled bungalow whose floors tilt toward the porch, whose back yard ends abruptly in a weedy ravine.

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The rules

What is this all about?

Rule #1

This is a poem-sharing blog. I share poems (those that "create imaginary gardens with real toads in them") that I really like, and if I think their copyright holders won't mind. To make up for it, I also share, when possible, a URL where the poem is housed, or the poet's bio, or a link to where one of their books can be purchased. The choice of poems is clear: it is those that move me, usually because they use language well.

Rule #2

If anyone thinks a poem featured here should be removed, I encourage them to let me know as soon as they can. Please use the contact form below. You can also email me directly. The poem will be gone as soon as the reason for its removal has been made clear. This site is but a humble appreciation of what is out there. This isn't a store. It's the window you gape through before you actually go into the store itself.

Rule #3

I would like to get more people interested in reading and writing poems. By putting out a poem a day for 365 days I am hoping that those who have signed up will actually do read a poem a day, and share the poems with others. There's nothing more stimulating and more educational. There's no better muse. If you think a poem of yours can help this site send it along. I'd be very happy to read it and see if it fits.

Rule #4

If you read something you like here, I encourage you to dig deeper (walk into the store itself) into the poet's work and if you are still happy with the poems, why not buy one or more of their books, to really find out what it is that makes them tick? This has to be a sort of public bookcase where reading leads to wanting to find more of what attracted us in the first place, a shop window. Like what you see? Step into the shop.

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Lots of poems that you will surely like as well, by both new and established poets.

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12 Books by Black Authors in Honor of Black History Month

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Our suggestions: from thrillers to science fiction to romance and essays Prolific writer Roxanne Gay explores her relationship to feminism and womanhood in this New York Times best-selling collection of essays. Through humor and insight, she admits that her favorite color is pink and that she reads Vogue unironically.

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he first few days of Stella Nyanzi's new life in Germany have not been without their challenges, from navigating the TV and internet in a different language to finding the right school for her three teenagers. On the second day, the family went shopping for clothes - "thick jackets, mittens and scarves" - to see them through the fierce Bavarian winter. For her 14-year-old twins, who have lived their whole lives in sub-Saharan Africa and who insisted on wearing Crocs with no socks on the flight over, the sub-zero temperatures were a rude awakening.

At the centre of it all, however, has been deep sense of relief. Nyanzi, a 47-year-old outspoken scholar, poet and human rights advocate whose irreverent writing about Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni, has seen her jailed twice, decided enough was enough. She has been accepted on a writers-in-exile programme run by PEN Germany, and has no intention of returning to Uganda while the 77-year-old Museveni is in power. And while there are many concerns about how she and her children are going to settle into Munich life, the sense of freedom is powering her on.

My children don't have to fear they'll have more nights with mama in prison or locked in a cell because I wrote a Facebook post

Stella Nyanz

"Because I'm very much a free-thinking, loud-mouthed, crass woman who boldly speaks her mind, I think one of the greatest joys is to be able to criticise Museveni's dictatorship and not fear for my life," she says.

"To not have thick-voiced men breathing down my telephone. And to be threatened online, but to know that the threats won't reach me, is really relieving. I know it's going to be difficult [with regards to] the practicalities. But, Jesus, the sense of freedom! The freedom from fear of retribution and reprisal and punishment, simply because one refuses to only praise the dictatorship, is to die for.

"I can suffer the winter and the cold and the hard language - and the food is a bit different. But it's freedom. You know: I am free at least. My children don't have to fear that they'll have more nights with mama in prison or locked up in a police cell simply because I wrote a Facebook post or I wrote too harshly about a dictator who is begging to be written harshly about. So that's freedom from fear, much more than freedom to do. Freedom to be is, like, immediate relief."

This week, the international spotlight has been on another critic of Uganda's president, novelist Kakwenza Rukirabashaija, whose book The Greedy Barbarian was seen as a satire of Museveni's Uganda. Rukirabashaija, 33, was charged earlier this month with "offensive communication" over tweets about the six-term president and his son. For two weeks, he was held in detention in an undisclosed location before he was released on bail. His lawyer says he was tortured.

Rukirabashaija's case is not unfamiliar to Nyanzi. The former university lecturer went to prison for a month in 2017 after referring to Museveni as "a pair of buttocks", and for nearly 16 months the year after, for writing a poem that described his mother's vagina in a variety of grotesque ways. ("Yoweri, they say it was your birthday yesterday./ How painfully ugly a day!/ I wish the lice-filled bush of dirty pubic hair overgrown all over Esiteri's unwashed chuchu had strangled you at birth./ Strangled you just like the long tentacles of corruption you sowed and watered into our bleeding economy.")

Nyanzi had tried to leave Uganda for Kenya in January 2021, after losing her bid to be elected as Kampala's women's representative. But, stymied by red tape, she returned home within months, trying to keep a low profile. Then, at the end of December, Rukirabashaija was detained, the doors of his home broken down by gunmen who whisked him away.

"And I thought: fuck the silence," Nyanzi says, speaking by telephone from Munich. "We cannot keep quiet in the face of such brutality. And I began to agitate again." In response, she says, the threats and intimidating messages started to return.

For anyone who has seen her bare her breasts in protest at a jail sentence or exit that jail clad in a tiara and sash declaring "FUCK OPPRESSION", it is hard to imagine Nyanzi ever not being a political activist. But, she says, it was only in recent years that she found her cause. Her first show of dissent was a naked protest at university. From then she embraced the anti-colonial Ugandan tradition of "radical rudeness" as a tool against oppression. It is, she says, highly effective, particularly from an otherwise respectable mother and university academic.

"People have said to me: perhaps radical rudeness will not oust Museveni. And I say: perhaps the intention is not to use rude poetry and big breasts in public to oust Museveni; perhaps the idea is to invite others to be able to poke holes in this huge over-glorification of a mighty, untouchable demigod and, if many of us are poking small holes, perhaps the mighty trunk of the tree will fall. I don't know."

She adds: "Many do not approve. But I'm not looking for approval."

When she went to Kenya in 2021, there was a backlash from fellow opposition critics who accused her of "leaving the battlefield" before the fight was won, and she anticipates similar censure now. But, after years of vigorous participation in the struggle, she thinks it is time for her to prioritise her children. Moreover, she feels freer to criticise Museveni from the safety of Germany. For the president, then, there is unlikely to be any letup. "Now that I'm out of the country, there's a bigger onus on me ... to write and speak out and use my voice," she says.

The Writers in Exile programme, funded by the German government, runs for up to three years. Some - but by no means all - of its participants go on to claim political asylum in the country. Does Nyanzi believe she will ever go back? "Uganda is my home. I have booked to be buried beside my father in our village," she says. "We have a beautiful equatorial sun; we don't have winter and snow. We have sweet pineapples and sweet bananas; we don't have frozen foods. We pick mangoes from the trees and eat them. I'd like to go back to that and live like that, but I also don't want my children to sleep on their own at night because their mother is in a prison cell simply because she writes a poem about Museveni."

She adds: "I hope to return because I have work to do in Uganda ... I want to make a change, contribute towards building the new Uganda post-Museveni. However, I do not want to go and live in fear simply because I'm being myself ... I don't want to kill the voice inside of me. As long as it's dangerous to speak out, as long as it's dangerous to write freely, I don't want to be in Uganda."
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'I'm free at last': Uganda's rudest poet on prison, protest and finding a new voice in Germany

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he first few days of Stella Nyanzi's new life in Germany have not been without their challenges, from navigating the TV and internet in a different language to finding the right school for her three teenagers. On the second day, the family went shopping for clothes - "thick jackets, mittens and scarves" - to see them through the fierce Bavarian winter.

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Short Conversations with Poets - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

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Carol Rumens's poem of the week | Books | The Guardian

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Each week Carol Rumens picks a poem to discuss

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International Festival of Arts and Ideas

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Five Poems by US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo

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The poems of US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo sing of beauty and survival, illuminating a spirituality that connects her to her ancestors and thrums with the quiet anger of living amid the ruins of injustice.

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For Calling the Spirit Back From Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet

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For Calling the Spirit Back From Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet

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During these trying days of social distancing, self-isolating and quarantines, days rife with fear and anxiety, my colleagues and I thought you might like some company. So each day we will be introducing you to poets we have met over the years. The only contagion they will expose you to is a measure of joy, reflection and meditation brought on by "the best words in the best order."
Enjoy.
- Bill Moyers
UPDATE: November 19, 2020: Joy Harjo, the first Native American poet to serve as U.S. poet laureate, has been reappointed to a rare third term by the Library of Congress. (PBS Newshour)
Today, we have something special, a poetry reading from U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo who is hunkered down in her home in Tulsa, OK. She has recorded herself reading a poem she wrote in 2015 entitled, "For Calling the Spirit Back From Wandering the Earth on Its Human Feet," that she hopes will help others during this time of isolation. She says,"It's a time to remember who we are and the best poems do that."

"For Calling the Spirit Back
From Wandering the Earth
in Its Human Feet"

Put down that bag of potato chips, that white bread, that
bottle of pop.

Turn off that cellphone, computer, and remote control.

Open the door, then close it behind you.

Take a breath offered by friendly winds. They travel
the earth gathering essences of plants to clean.

Give back with gratitude.

If you sing it will give your spirit lift to fly to the stars' ears and
back.

Acknowledge this earth who has cared for you since you were
a dream planting itself precisely within your parents' desire.

Let your moccasin feet take you to the encampment of the
guardians who have known you before time,
who will be there after time.
They sit before the fire that has been there without time.

Let the earth stabilize your postcolonial insecure jitters.

Be respectful of the small insects, birds and animal people
who accompany you.
Ask their forgiveness for the harm we humans have brought
down upon them.

Don't worry.
The heart knows the way though there may be high-rises,
interstates, checkpoints, armed soldiers, massacres, wars, and
those who will despise you because they despise themselves.

The journey might take you a few hours, a day, a year, a few
years, a hundred, a thousand or even more.

Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and
leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the
thieves of time.

Do not hold regrets.

When you find your way to the circle, to the fire kept burning
by the keepers of your soul, you will be welcomed.

You must clean yourself with cedar, sage, or other healing plant.

Cut the ties you have to failure and shame.

Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of your ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our direction.

Ask for forgiveness.

Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take many forms: animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or ancestor.

Call yourself back. You will find yourself caught in corners and creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse.

You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return.
Speak to it as you would to a beloved child.

Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It will return
in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be
happy to be found after being lost for so long.

Your spirit will need to sleep awhile after it is bathed and
given clean clothes.

Now you can have a party. Invite everyone you know who
loves and supports you. Keep room for those who have no
place else to go.

Make a giveaway, and remember, keep the speeches short.

Then, you must do this: help the next person find their way through the dark.

© Joy Harjo. Conflict Resolution From Holy Beings. W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.
Photo credit for still: Matika Wilbur

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A Poet a Day: US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo - BillMoyers.com

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During these trying days of social distancing, self-isolating and quarantines, days rife with fear and anxiety, my colleagues and I thought you might like some company. So each day we will be introducing you to poets we have met over the years.

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Remembering poets Lynda Hull and Michael S. Harper, with original portraits

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Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, born at Hillbrow in Johannesburg, is an award-winning South African writer and performance artist. The daughter of an Australian mother and a Ghanaian father, she was given up for adoption at nine months of age, although she was not told of it by her adoptive parents, a white family in apartheid South Africa, until she was 20 years old. She has commented that the negotiation of her situation has informed much of her writing. De Villiers studied journalism at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, and obtained a degree in Dramatic Art and Scriptwriting from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. She is also a graduate of the Lecoq International School of Theatre in Paris, France, where she studied mime and theatre. Returning to South Africa in 1998, she worked as an actor for two years, before Bell's palsy forced her to consider an alternative career in writing. Over the next eight years she wrote scripts for South African television, and collaborated with Pule Hlatshwayo and Charlotte Lesche to create Score, a three-hour mini series for Swedish Broadcasting. In 2005, she won a mentorship with English poet John Lindley through the British Council's distance learning scheme 'Crossing Borders.'

In 2006, Centre for the Book published her first volume of poetry, Taller than Buildings, described by True Love Magazine as "an extraordinary debut collection of poetry, that is provocative and original, mirroring the transitions of self and country." Her second collection, The Everyday Wife, was launched at the Harare International Festival of the Arts in 2010. Her writing has been widely published in journals and anthologies, and De Villiers is a renowned reader of her work, performing internationally. She has toured her autobiographical one-woman show, Original Skin, in South Africa and abroad, which centres on her confusion about her identity at a young age. She has also written plays, including Where the Children Live (2005), and is editor of No Serenity Here (2010), an anthology of African Poetry published in China. Among her many awards are the 2009 National Arts Festival Writing Beyond the Fringe Prize, and a 2011 South African Literary Award. In 2014, De Villiers was the Commonwealth Poet, performing at Westminster Abbey in the presence of 2000 representatives of the Commonwealth and the royal family. She currently lectures in Creative Writing at Wits University in Johannesburg.

De Villiers' readings emphasise the concern which orientates much of her work: an elusive 'between-ness' that evades easy categorisation, and which is engaged with by her poetry to undermine simplistic cultural perceptions. Her delivery heightens her work's swift, mercurial qualities, incorporating many seemingly contradictory elements - her poems adopt and shrug off a traditional, almost demure, English enunciation for African inflections, and are at once humorous and determined, reasoning and frustrated, thoughtful and musical, fast-moving and long-lasting. Her imaginative reach is perhaps best exemplified in her poem 'The River', in which her voice hurries the listener through a strange, apocalyptic vision of a weeping city, before being "carried into the night, where our dreams grew taller than buildings."
Phillippa Yaa de Villiers's favourite Poetry Sayings:
Imagination
Creates the situation,
And, the situation,
Creates imagination.

It may, of course
Be the other way round
Columbus was discovered
By what he found - James Baldwin

'Poetry helps us imagine one another's lives. It gives us intimate insights into someone else's experience. To be able to have that kind of insight in thirty seconds or three minutes is a very precious kind of transmission. It's not cluttered with a lot of extraneous, explanatory matter or the kind of chatter that comes so easily on the news these days. We're surrounded by talk and language and reporting and stories of a certain kind, the "breaking news" kind, but I think we hunger for another kind of story, the story that helps us just feel connected with one another, be with one another. A slower kind of empathy. I think we hunger for that now more than ever.' - Naomi Shihab Nye

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Phillippa Yaa de Villiers - Poetry Archive

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Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, born at Hillbrow in Johannesburg, is an award-winning South African writer and performance artist. The daughter of an Australian mother and a Ghanaian father, she was given up for adoption at nine months of age, although...

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Poem of the Week | Sampsonia Way Magazine

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Wing nights attract like tree stars; barstools and booths become bonafide Bedrocks; boasts of the best are shared like rumors and maps to Skull Island. Roars of napkin-muffled belches and a show-and-tell of aromas greet festive company ready to make flavorful discoveries buried in meat instead of layers of crumbly history.

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Botsotso is pleased to announce that it is now hosting administration of this trust.

The function of the trust is to negotiate terms of Permission and Rights under which Alan Paton's work may be published, translated and/or used in any other manner, such as adaptation.

The literary managers are Warren Jeremy Rourke and Kharys Ateh Laue who are contactable at

All Permissions and Rights accrue directly to the Trust.

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Botsotso is pleased to announce that it is now hosting administration of this trust. The function of the trust is to negotiate terms of Permission and Rights under which Alan Paton's work may be published, translated and/or used in any other manner, such as adaptation.

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Join a conversation 200 years in the making. We believe in the power of connecting great minds across disciplines, backgrounds, and generations.

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Disclaimer

We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2021 by Susan Nguyen, "Ode to Hunger" from Dear Diaspora, (University of Nebraska Press, 2021). Poem reprinted by permission of the author and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2022 by The Poetry Foundation.

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Like music, one supposes, food, the memory of its procuring, preparing and consuming, leaves an indelible mark on us that is visceral and easily stirred. We all must eat, and so we all know our own private litany of foods of our childhood. Susan Nguyen calls her poem an "Ode to Hunger", reminding...

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A poem for the innocents A killing moon peeks through leavesof trumpet trees in full bloomfor Lent, their barks crisscrossedby wild strokes of a machetewhen my son tried to help me

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Michelle McGrane 's collection The Suitable Girl is published by Pindrop Press in the United Kingdom and Modjaji Books in South Africa. Sh...

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A collection of poems from around the world

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A senior Trump advisor, Stephen Miller, sparked a furor last week when he dismissed the famous poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty. In response, we asked 21 poets: what type of poem would Trump like to see at the statue?

Last week, Donald Trump threw his support behind a "merit"-based immigration policy that would would drastically curb legal immigration to America. Under the plan, applicants with English proficiency, doctorates, high salaries, investment holdings and credentials like Olympic medals and Nobel prizes would be given preference.

The proposal kicked off a ferocious debate at a White House press briefing when CNN's Jim Acosta asked Miller if the plan violated the spirit of the poem The New Colossus, inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty. The poem, by Emma Lazarus, includes the celebrated welcoming lines: "Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

Miller responded by noting that the poem "was added later and was not part of the original Statue of Liberty". He went on to attack Acosta for his "cosmopolitan bias".

And so, the Guardian asked 21 American poets - from the Pulitzer prize winner Rita Dove to the Inuit poet Joan Kane - to imagine in writing what type of poem would Trump like to see at the statue? We also gave the poets the option to write a contemporary take on the Lazarus poem. What follows is the extraordinary collection of work they produced on a short deadline.

We'd also like to invite our readers to join the Guardian's Lady Liberty poetry challenge. We'll publish a selection of our favorite reader-submitted poems. You can read more about how to enter here.

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Huddled masses? Losers! Trump v Statue of Liberty

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A senior Trump advisor, Stephen Miller, sparked a furor last week when he dismissed the famous poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty. In response, we asked 21 poets: what type of poem would Trump like to see at the statue?

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from "How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton" published by BOA Editions

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Amanda Gorman Reads Tracy K. Smith | The New Yorker: Poetry | WNYC

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Amanda Gorman joins Kevin Young to discuss "Declaration," by Tracy K. Smith, and her own poem "Ship's Manifest."

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500 million+ members | Manage your professional identity. Build and engage with your professional network. Access knowledge, insights and opportunities.

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Brilliant idea, I think, to padlet these resources (there you go, I've used padlet as a verb)

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Poem-a-Day is the original and only daily digital poetry series featuring over 250 new, previously unpublished poems by today’s talented poets each year.

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Poem-a-Day is the original and only daily digital poetry series featuring over 250 new, previously unpublished poems by today's talented poets each year. Steve Bellin-Oka is the guest editor of November. Read or listen to a Q&A with Bellin-Oka about his curatorial process, and learn more about the 2023 guest editors. Support Poem-a-Day.
If you have any questions about Poem-a-Day, visit our Poem-a-Day FAQ.

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Poem-a-Day - Poem-a-Day is the original and only daily digital poetry series featuring over 250 new, previousl

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Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka, known as Wole Soyinka, is a Nigerian playwright, novelist, poet, and essayist in the English language. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first sub-Saharan African to be honoured in that category. Soyinka was born into a Yoruba family in Abeokuta.

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The price seemed reasonable, location

Indifferent. The landlady swore she lived

Off premises. Nothing remained

But self-confession. "Madame," I warned,

"I hate a wasted journey-I am African."

Silence. Silenced transmission of

Pressurized good breeding. Voice, when it came,

Lipstick coated, long gold-rolled

Cigarette-holder pipped. Caught I was, foully.

"HOW DARK?"... I had not misheard... "ARE YOU LIGHT

OR VERY DARK?" Button B. Button A. Stench

Of rancid breath of public hide-and-speak.

Red booth. Red pillar box. Red double-tiered

Omnibus squelching tar. It was real! Shamed

By ill-mannered silence, surrender

Pushed dumbfoundment to beg simplification.

Considerate she was, varying the emphasis -

"ARE YOU DARK? OR VERY LIGHT?" Revelation came.

"You mean - like plain or milk chocolate?"

Her assent was clinical, crushing in its light

Impersonality. Rapidly, wave-length adjusted,

I chose. "West African Sepia" - and as afterthought,

"Down in my passport." Silence for spectroscopic

Flight of fancy, till truthfulness clanged her accent

Hard on the mouthpiece. "WHAT'S THAT?" conceding

"DON'T KNOW WHAT THAT IS." "Like brunette."

"THAT'S DARK, ISN'T IT?" "Not altogether.

Facially, I am brunette, but madam, you should see

The rest of me. Palm of my hand, soles of my feet

Are a peroxide blonde. Friction, caused -

Foolishly madam - by sitting down, has turned

My bottom raven black - One moment madam!" - sensing

Her receiver rearing on the thunderclap

About my ears - "Madam," I pleaded, "wouldn't you rather

See for yourself?"

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The price seemed reasonable, location Indifferent. The landlady swore she lived Off premises. Nothing remained But self-confession. "Madame," I warned, "I hate a wasted journey-I am African." Silence. Silenced transmission of Pressurized good breeding. Voice, when it came, Lipstick coated, long gold-rolled Cigarette-holder pipped. Caught I was, foully. "HOW DARK?"...

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In every crowd, there is the one

with horns, casually moving through

the bodies as if this is the living

room of a creature with horns,

a long cloak and the song of tongues

on the lips of the body. To see

the horns, one's heart rate must

reach one hundred and seventy

five beats per minute, at a rate

faster than the blink of an eye,

for the body with horns lives

in the space between the blink

and light - slow down the blink

and somewhere in the white space

between sight and sightlessness

is twilight, and in that place,

that gap, the stop-time, the horn-

spinning, dancing, strolling

through the crowd; and in the

fever of revelation, you will

understand why the shaman

is filled with the hubris

of creation, why the healer

forgets herself and feels like

angels about to take flight.

the mosquito mesh, the drums

do not stop through the night,

me sour porridge and nuts

and sways, Welcome, welcome.

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In every crowd, there is the one with horns, casually moving through the bodies as if this is the living room of a creature with horns, a long cloak and the song of tongues on the lips of the body.

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From Kumina

the 21 days

i sit here in this chair trying to unravel Time so that it wouldn't happen twine

on the second day
of yr death. i break a small

bread

i can still smell the sweet flour of yr firstborn flesh

on the third day
of yr death. the water in my urine turn to blood
i cover the waterfront of the mirror w/a blue cloth where yr face stood

on the fourth day
yu shd be rising. knocking at the door of
darkness. coming back to me

i do not hear yr call

he struts round to the back-a-wall
his one eye clicking as he crows

comes to the glissen of my window & he crows
loud like the overflowing voice of my Trelawny
waterfall

sweeet showers needs
sweet rain from heaven
*

i see them once again inside the chapel of my funeral

on the seventh day
after yr death. the yellow flour
in the cup-cakes in the kitchen have gone sour

there is an eye of rancid in the middle of their meal

i am unhappy like the wind & tides are restless rivers
i can't find you. i can't find you. i cannot cannot cannot be console to dreams

the mad dogs of the pasture kill the cock & pillage
it. madwoman wind is scattering white screaming feathers' petals' pedals over all
the brunt and burnin ochre-colour land

on the eiate day
after yr death
me do nothin. nothin. nothin. i can't even get yr inglish 'eighth' spelt straight

it is my pain it is my privilege * it is my own torn flesh torn fresh
o let me comfort us my chile * is not yr heart is broken

yu. an whe dem hide yu body
and po. lice who dealin w/ this case they cannot look me in the lips
and No One kno

whe the boy is or gone or when he will come-back
ten time dis ten dem mek me up & down & book & fourt
to fine my sun. an ten ten time dem ave no ansa for me for me for me

in dis dry-weatha tunda
dem seh because i poor & have no book to haul-out
inside dis station. an i inn got no song

to sing becau i colour in dis Marcus Garvey country proud an strong
an wrong - yu sun gone out & still you colour wrong.
inn got no i say song

i wonda whe Port Royal is. when de eart goin again goin crack

my daughta Ingriid walk beside me hurt
an strong an dress in black
her face inside she face int mekkin sport

on the tenth night after a long long distance silence
i born into this world w/ nothing but my breath & my bare back an hornets
in my chess

my breath give birt to good like god
my sun dis gold is all my riches that cannot be replace
an suddenly me cannot fine him in dis place before dis good god face to face
wha good fe god. no god. what good. wha god. no god
if good Mark have no face to face dis god inside dis good god place

on the eleventh day after he dead
[Silence]

[Silence]

this night we hold our wake. watch w/ the spirit of my sum before his daily funeral
* people cook food bring bread & drink & there's some singing
of the old traditions by the older folks & country citizens

but they soon fall to arguing and they soon fall down to quarrellin
about the words the phrases time & tempo of these sookey tunes
it seem they isolated in the old traditions in these coffee hills

From Born to Slow Horses
Copyright © 2005 by Kamau Brathwaite

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From Kumina the 21 days i sit here in this chair trying to unravel Time so that it wouldn't happen twine on the second day of yr death. i break a small bread i can still smell the sweet flour of yr firstborn flesh on the third day of yr death.

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Kozain was born in Paarl. After he matriculated, he studied at the University of Cape Town. In 1994 and 1995 he attended Bowling Green State University in Ohio, United States on a Full Bright Scholarship. From 1998 to 2004 he was a lecturer at the University of Cape Town.

In addition to two collections of poetry, he has also published reviews, essays and short fiction. Further writing can be found on his personal web site at Groundwork.

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Geoffrey Philp, author of the e-book, Bob Marley and Bradford’s iPod, has also written five collections of poetry, two children's e-books, and two short story collections. An award-winning writer whose work explores the themes of masculinity and fatherhood in a Caribbean context, Philp is one of the few writers whose work has been published in the Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories and the Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse. His blog, geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com, covers literary events in the Caribbean and Miami, where lives with wife, Nadia, and their three children, Anna, Christina, and Andrew.

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children's e-books, and two short story collections. An award-winning writer whose work explores the themes of masculinity and fatherhood in a Caribbean context, Philp is one of the few writers whose work has been published in the Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories and the Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse. His blog, geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com, covers literary events in the Caribbean and Miami, where lives with wife, Nadia, and their three children, Anna, Christina, and Andrew. Geoffrey Philp, author of the e-book, Bob Marley and Bradford's iPod, has also written five collections of poetry, two

Geoffrey Philp Interview, with Julie Brooks Barbour

A few years ago, Kamau Brathwaite suggested that I should write a book of poems about Marcus Garvey. At first, I resisted the idea because I was fixated on Garvey the icon and not the man. But then, quite by chance, a series of events led me to consider the possibility of writing a children's book, so I wrote Marcus Garvey not only espoused certain qualities and values, which the Coalition for the Exoneration of Marcus Garvey, (I serve as the social media manager) has incorporated into the RESPECT Garvey campaign (redemption, education, self-reliance, purpose, entrepreneurship, community, and tradition), he demonstrated them in his daily life. With the exception of entrepreneurship, these are the values that are at the heart of I would also add love. In Then, I wrote Between the readings and the lectures, the poems from the book,
I admire the ways in which these poems re-imagine the life of Marcus Garvey. Writing about a historical figure seems daunting, as there is an entire life to draw from, but these poems in particular speak from the angle of identity. How did you arrive at this focus? Have you faced any obstacles in writing about a person with such a rich history?

Marcus and the Amazons, which combines the lives and teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Marcus Garvey. Then, I wrote a non-fiction book, The Story of Marcus Garvey, which is currently with a publisher. Because I had to think about the qualities that would make Garvey comprehensible and entertaining for children, it created a space for me to imaginatively explore Garvey's life through poetry.

What were some of the qualities you focused on in the children's book that inspired the poems about Marcus Garvey? Marcus and the Amazons. Marcus and the Amazons, the hero, Marcus Formica, rallies his nation to save Amy, his bride-to-be and future queen of the colony, from the Amazons, who have kidnapped her. In the book as in life, Garvey's love for his people and for Amy Jacques Garvey gave him the courage to organize the largest human rights campaign during one of the most segregated periods of American history.

I see so many of the qualities you mention at work in these poems: Garvey searching for a sense of identity as a child, at the printing press finding his voice, and bringing a community together through tradition. I admire how the imagery used in these poems offers snapshots of Garvey's life. Since there are more sections to the long poem than are published here, could you talk about a few more of the moments of Garvey's life that inspired you and the ways in which you've included these? Letter from Marcus Garvey has fifty-one sections, and I would like to think that each offers an epiphany into Garvey's complex life. There are, however, certain sections that I hope my skill as a poet revealed the emotional truth of the situation. These sections are "30. ~J. Edgar Hoover," "31. ~James Wormley Jones, "Agent 800" and "33. ~William Edward Burghardt Du Bois," which are narrated from the point of view of Garvey's detractors. If I had to choose a favorite from the three, I'd have to choose "31. ~James Wormley Jones, "Agent 800." This poem was very difficult to write because James Wormley Jones, an intimate of Garvey, was the first black man to be hired by the Bureau of Investigation (the precursor to the FBI) under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover. I'd often wondered why Jones, a WW1 veteran who saw the horrors of serving in a segregated army and knew about the race riots of East St. Louis in 1917, could betray the only black leader at that time who had a comprehensive plan for the liberation of "Africans at home and abroad."

I noticed from your blog and bio that you are a teacher, an active member of the literary community, and a supporter of social change. Could you talk about how these areas of your life intersect with and inspire your writing?

When I was in high school, I never thought I would be a poet because all the poets I knew, Dennis Scott, Mervyn Morris, and Lorna Goodison, were geniuses. And coming out of postcolonial Jamaica, I didn't think I had what Anton Nimblett calls "permission to speak"-there are some who still believe this, but that's another story. So, I bided my time and learned as much as I could about the craft of poetry and this naturally extended into teaching-for at the heart of poetry is the impulse to share the discovery of beauties. I became a good teacher and at the start of every semester, I asked myself three questions: What do I want my students to know? What do I want them to care about? What do I want them to do? For about twenty years, my poetry was separated from my teaching because there was nothing to do about the themes that interested me: the effects of the undeclared civil war in Jamaica during the seventies; the plight of fatherless boys in the Caribbean, and the denigration of the African presence in the Americas. Marcus and the Amazons and my poetry was now wedded to praxis. For the more I read to the children of the diaspora, the more I saw the world through Garvey's eyes. I now had something to do. I petitioned Representative Frederica Wilson for the exoneration of Marcus Garvey and she has agreed. I also started a petition to President Obama and this opened up other opportunities for me to lecture about Garvey and Pan-Africanism. Letter from Marcus Garvey, emerged and I give thanks that you have chosen to share a few of them with your readers.
Letter from Marcus Garvey
The old linotype, like a neglected spinster,

idled in the backroom of the printery

where I was apprenticed to my godfather

to learn the mysteries of binding

after my father disappeared into the bush.

Lifting the magazine, I worked through the night

on the escapement, dabbing oil on the levers

that squeezed matrices as easily as the ratchets

in the sugar mill chewed my grandfather's arm.

Under the pressure of my fingers that knew

each character's weight and plumb

I coaxed a line from the worn slug,

and breathed my first words on to the page.

Am I the only Jamaican who wants to be black?

My sisters burn their flesh pink so they won't be black.

Sweetening their blood, my brothers prefer to gorge on English tarts,

than feast on local delicacies because that would be too black.

Yearning like school boys to be dubbed "Knights of the Empire," we claw

each other to kneel before the King, when we should stand proud and black.

O, how we have deformed our souls, sacrificed our bodies to foreign gods

when we should have reveled in the power, grace, and beauty of being black.

There's an old African proverb, "Until lions tell their tale, the hunter

will always be the hero." When I tell our story, I will write it black.

Years later, my father would try

to explain, why after shoveling dirt

for three hours in the vault of a neighbor's

son, he'd abandoned me in an empty grave.

And no matter how much I wailed,

"Pa, the duppies are coming after me,"

he calmly chiseled the boy's name

into the headstone and said, "I hope you

have learned to fear nothing, except God."

Toward noon, I fell asleep with one thought:

Is this what it felt like to die so young?

To never find the meaning of your name?

When I emerged by torchlight from the tomb,

covered in dirt, I was no longer his son.

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Geoffrey Philp, author of the e-book, Bob Marley and Bradford's iPod, has also written five collections of poetry, two children's e-books, and two short story collections. An award-winning writer whose work explores the themes of masculinity and fatherhood in a Caribbean context, Philp is one of the few writers whose work has been published in the Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories and the Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse.

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Out of 1 200 submissions!!!!

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For nearly seven decades, 92Y's Discovery Poetry Contest has recognized the exceptional work of poets who have not yet published a first book. Many of these writers-John Ashbery, Mark Strand, Lucille Clifton, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Larry Levis, Mary Jo Bang, and Solmaz Sharif, among many others-have gone on to become leading voices in their generations.

This year's competition received close to twelve hundred submissions, which were read by preliminary judges Timothy Donnelly and Mai Der Vang. After much deliberation, final judges Daniel Borzutzky, Randall Mann, and Patricia Smith awarded this year's prizes to Alfredo Aguilar, Bernard Ferguson, Omotara James, and Alycia Pirmohamed. The runners-up were Mia Kang, Henry Mills, and Jasmine Reid.

The four winners receive five hundred dollars, publication on The Paris Review Daily, a stay at the Ace Hotel, and a reading at 92Y's Unterberg Poetry Center on May 16. Congratulations to the winners! We're pleased to present their work below.

Alfredo Aguilar is the son of Mexican immigrants. He is the author of the chapbook What Happens on Earth. His work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Best New Poets 2017, The Shallow Ends, and elsewhere. Originally from North County San Diego, he now resides in Texas.

*
Listening to a Recording from Tornillo, Texas
i hunched over my device

& heard brown children
set apart into tents
cry out
for their parents

a guard said of their cries
it sounds like an orchestra-
all we need is a conductor

i paused the recording

i knew i shared this blame
& filled a piano with flames
because i didn't believe
we had a right to song

i placed silver coins into the hands that could help
& allowed myself a walk

i looked at family photos-
my & my siblings' young faces
how many young faces can fit inside a tent-

i won't write this fucking poem

what good is every poem
if it can't reunite a family
if it can't tear the tarp off a camp
if it can't bring those responsible
to the mouth of a mob

Bernard Ferguson is a Bahamian immigrant poet, an M.F.A. candidate at NYU, a Writers in the Public Schools Fellow, and an assistant editor at Washington Square Review. He's a 2019 Adroit Journal Gregory Djanikian Scholar and the winner of the 2019 Nâzım Hikmet Poetry Prize. His work is published or forthcoming in The Common, SLICE Magazine, Pinwheel, Winter Tangerine, and Best New Poets 2017.

*
up the creek of my nostril, with an uncoiling thing
with perhaps a hollow rope or a foolish vacuum, exhaling & pushing
cotton into my skull, stuffing the small tubes through
which, otherwise, the scents of my favorite sugar
& cinnamon treats would wander through, with their hints of
guava that would signal my knees to bend & run
toward a window or porch where a sister or an aunt await
with the warm gooey duff that, at my young age, made my life
worth living, or, if not confectionery, the pheromones of my lover
that would cause, at least a few parts of me, like my blood, to stir
& other parts, like my back, to stiffen & rise, causing all of me to
rise, & bloom, or to wish for blooming then, along with my lover,
whose voice is now a few more steps removed from the box i keep
behind my eyes, tiny receptacle in which i collect my sounds & evidence
of that which we call music, the box whose mouth is now covered
in mesh, which must have been placed there by a thief who does not thieve
but instead prevents thieving, the thief who must be a man, must
have, with his dirty devices, poured the fabric into my nose or else
slipped a portion of the Atlantic into one ear & clogged my thinking
& my hearing & my loving & so, little ones, you with your small & new
lungs, you with your loud, incessant breathing, if you see that man
with his thieving & cotton & wide pockets of salt, you tell that man
& only that man in particular we're through.

Omotara James is the author of the chapbook Daughter Tongue, selected by African Poetry Book Fund for the 2018 New Generation African Poets Box Set. Born in Britain, she is the daughter of Nigerian and Trinidadian immigrants. Her poetry has appeared in Academy of American Poets, Literary Hub, Poetry Society of America, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships from Lambda Literary and the Cave Canem Foundation.

*
Promise
When they send the robot to replace me, do not be gentle
with it. Place these chords where its heart chakra should be.
Do not speak to it of a fountain- tell it, in the middle of
its life, there will be a flower: a blooming petalled trauma.
Tell it, I considered beauty, once, but there were white-
iced, gingerbread cookies, brown with molasses, in the
ceramic, black, Santa jar. My father's mangoes, green, red
and yellow, were in a wooden bowl on the kitchen counter,
unharmed, having traveled so far beyond their home. There
were the last hours before sleep, when mother borrowed
energy from the next day to make at least three nights'
worth of dinners for us. Until the night roused me with
more night and I masticated with tongue. Masticated with
teeth. Masticated in my sleeping gown. Masticated beneath
the sheets. Masticated in the bathroom stalls at school so
quiet you wouldn't hear me over the sound of a raindrop. I
am a master-cator. I will masticate. Until there's nothing.
Until I'm full. Until I'm done.

Alycia Pirmohamed is a Canadian-born poet living in Scotland, where she is completing a Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of the chapbook Faces that Fled the Wind and the winner of the 2018 Ploughshares Emerging Writers' Contest in Poetry. Her poetry has recently appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Adroit Journal, The London Magazine, Room Magazine, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and others. She received an M.F.A. from the University of Oregon.

*
The Making of a Ghost
the rap rap

rap of ghosts at the door. there are considerations
she must take when the great greats

cross yet another spilled sari of ocean water.
this time the embarkment

is holier than the last, the locusts woven into maple
trees and the buzzards with moon faces.

she gnashes open the green cardamom,
sheds the seeds into her own grave

and never questions equilibrium. the fill of one story
into another's mouth. all of her

meat another lineage, an answering before
the wound is born.

with sweet water found in the rivers, she washes
her body three times.

this is what the ghosts pass down: one hand
over the other, a valley of long stems,

and the ritual of washing a body only an odd number
of times before the dirt.

she is laying down the past like a row of knives.
she begins here, ends here

in the language of pine forest overlain with gulls.
country, again, she is knocking

on the glass of your windows. again, she is jotting
down the script of your cattle.

country, at last, gift her a homecoming.
The winners of the Discovery Poetry Contest will read from their work on May 16 at 92Y's Unterberg Poetry Center.

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The Winners of 92Y's 2019 Discovery Poetry Contest - The Paris Review

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For nearly seven decades, 92Y's Discovery Poetry Contest has recognized the exceptional work of poets who have not yet published a first book. Many of these writers-John Ashbery, Mark Strand, Lucille Clifton, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Larry Levis, Mary Jo Bang, and Solmaz Sharif, among many others-have gone on to become leading voices in their generations.

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Various writers

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Credit... Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

The Book Review's poetry columnist, Elisa Gabbert, picks her seven favorite collections of the year.

Credit... Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

This year of slow and careful re-emergence has felt, to me, like an odd one for books. There was so much abundance that it taxed our attentions, and even highly anticipated titles seemed to come and go quietly. I wish I had more space to highlight all of the books I read and loved in 2021, but these seven collections were personal favorites, and the ones I most want to share.

Image

BLOOD ON THE FOG, by Tongo Eisen-Martin. (City Lights, 107 pp., paper, $15.95.) Reminiscent of June Jordan in their near-embrace of violence, these poems have a powerful ambivalence about what effect they might have in the world; they are very aware of being poems: "A non-future dripping with real people/I mean, real people ... Not poem people." "I write poems today/I kill america today." "Has the poem started yet?/I will tuck your shirt into the earth." The language is visionary, sometimes trancelike. "It takes a violent middleman for me to talk to myself." "I'm sorry to make you relive all of this, Lord ... Lord, is that my revolver in your hand?" "I am weak first/Before anything, I first become weak." "there goes the poet - killing without killing - don't mind this." Words are not the revolution itself, Eisen-Martin seems to say, and yet this book disturbed me more than any other I read this year. It reminds me that poetry can rewire our thinking - can actually change our minds - by using nothing like the rote language we're so used to hearing in speech and in prose. It can jolt us out of patterns, back into intelligence.

LITTLE ELEGIES FOR SISTER SATAN, by Michael Palmer. (New Directions, 117 pp., paper, $16.95.) It was a good year for our older poets, with new books by legends like Frank Bidart and Louise Glück, and this, with its stunning first sequence of elegies that call to mind Rilke, Celan, Inger Christensen - there's a way that even poetry written in one's native tongue already feels translated, as though the language of the mind were always foreign. "Oh, body, where are you going,/body of the earth, lost/double, lost copy of the body/mute body of yesterday/in tomorrow's shredded cloth?" These are poems about confronting the end, the end of one's own time and time in general, about repetition ("That is why, each day, when I return/to the illegible page/I must begin again/from the beginning"; "Let us begin, let us begin again/not from the beginning but from the end") and the paradox of poetry, its ability to say the unsayable, to exist and yet remain unsaid, the utility of futility. "When I think of 'possible worlds,' I think not of philosophy, but of elegy. And impossible worlds. Resistant worlds." "Never beg for mercy/from the poem,/since it can offer none./Do not ask/what language it speaks,/since the answer is none."

LOVE AND OTHER POEMS, by Alex Dimitrov. (Copper Canyon, 119 pp., paper, $17.) A highly pleasurable, heavily Frank O'Hara-influenced collection in love with moments and New York City and the aesthetics of cyclical ephemerality (see "November": "Is the first snow just snow./It feels like more"), full of exuberance and wistfulness, longing and joy. The poet is present as a self-referential persona. The last long poem, written over the course of two years in the back of different cabs, is a highlight: "Once I was 19/and now I'm 33 ... When I was younger/all I wanted was to be taken seriously./A serious poet! Why not./Now I realize being taken seriously/is as arbitrary as how long you live./I would gladly trade wisdom for youth."

RETURNING THE SWORD TO THE STONE, by Mark Leidner. (Fonograf Editions, 85 pp., paper, $16.) Leidner is a comic genius, which is to say this book is both hilarious and profound. Every time I have attempted to read "I'm Running for President" out loud, I have cried laughing: "I sew closed the neckholes of my sweatshirts/then sew beltloops along their bottom hems/and slide my legs through the sleeves/because I wear sweatshirts like pants-/and I cut the crotches out of all my sweatpants/for my head to go through/because I wear sweatpants like shirts/with my arms through the legs/and I'm running for President." But then there are also lines like this: "Life is long for a brief time/then brief for a long time."

THE SUNFLOWER CAST A SPELL TO SAVE US FROM THE VOID, by Jackie Wang. (Nightboat, 131 pp., paper, $16.95.) Wang is working in a kind of combination of the vivid surrealist, fabulist, scary-funny dream logic of James Tate and something more argumentative, theory-laced, dialectical, like Anne Boyer. The poems employ oneiromancy as strategy, because "interpretation itself is always strategic ... politically and personally enabling." Here dreams are spaces of radical possibility, and as in the real world, the possibilities are sometimes magical (Kant arrives at a party, so "drugs are unnecessary") and sometimes nightmarish ("You have put yourself at the center of the battle of cosmic forces and lowered your sword./Because you were willing to die, you will be spared./But ... /But") and sometimes both, like dress rehearsals for the apocalypse ("In the dream I was someone clear-headed and focused under pressure. The problem didn't consume me; all there was to do was solve it").

THE VAULT, by Andrés Cerpa. (Alice James Books, 85 pp., paper, $17.95.) A teacher once told me that a poem should be like a spider web - if you touch any part, the rest of it will tremble. This whole book feels like that, full of delicate resonance, motifs of color, weather as mood. The "silence in the seam with which to break pills" trembles when we reach "three seamless moments," whenever anything seems. Consisting of two long poems, open and spacious, it evokes a real sense of lived-through time, of time as a problem to solve over and over. "Nowhere compiles with precision/like dust into books." "I want the past like a harvest again." "I couldn't draw my own face if god asked." "I feel old/like I've only been alive today." Elegiac and clean and cold, "The Vault," in its trueness, reminds me of Robert Lowell's description of Plath's posthumously published work: It "makes one feel at first reading that almost all other poetry is about nothing."

WINGS IN TIME, by Callie Garnett. (The Song Cave, 98 pp., paper, $18.95.) There was a period last year when, everyone being understandably miserable, it was fashionable to pre-complain about all the awful books that were surely being written during and about the pandemic, to loudly dread the future when these ill-begotten books would be foisted upon us. As it happens I've already read several great pandemic books, this one among them. It refers to itself a few times as "scrappy," meaning both, I think, resourceful/tough, and fashioned from scraps. (I like the way the word "scrappy" connotes something like crappiness, but in an affectionate way.) Both free and exact, the poems identifiably arise from a specific consciousness, or what we sometimes call a soul. "The virus possibility/is heavy today; I sense a reclamation/Of the past occurring, so remotely,/but what past? ... I read about a woman whose life in ninety/Seconds changed./Well, mine is changing/slowly."

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The Book Review's poetry columnist, Elisa Gabbert, picks her seven favorite collections of the year. Credit... Sara Krulwich/The New York Times This year of slow and careful re-emergence has felt, to me, like an odd one for books. There was so much abundance that it taxed our attentions, and even highly anticipated titles seemed to come and go quietly.

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Various Writers

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We don't know when it will happen - whether some April or July or December will be the cruelest month - but we know poets are fascinated with the end of the world. Novelists and essayists ponder the apocalypse, but poems are particularly suited toward capturing the anxiety of the end.

Consider Robert Penn Warren's " Evening Hawk," which narrows from the grand expansive - a hawk's wing that "scythes down another day" along the "crashless fall of stalks of Time" - to the airless and anxious: "If there were no wind we might, we think, hear / The earth grind on its axis, or history / Drip in darkness like a leaking pipe in the cellar." The relative brevity of Warren's poem enables its power. We don't need volumes upon volumes to proclaim the end: we need one final, focused gasp.

In a letter dated May 16, 1945, Wallace Stevens posed a question as a statement: "At the moment, the war is shifting from Europe to Asia, and why one should be writing about poetry at all is hard to understand." Faced with destruction and death, the action of criticism feels cold and academic. Poetry, on the other hand, becomes necessary as the world crumbles. After 9/11, poetry seemed natural; many of us in New York City and its shadow carried folded copies of W.B. Yeats's " The Second Coming" and " September 1, 1939" by W.H. Auden.

If we accept Stevens's definition of the poetic act as "the desire to contain the world wholly within one's own perception of it," then poems about the end are simultaneously selfish and heroic attempts at survival. Here are 10 poems to prepare us for the end of the world.

"The world begins at a kitchen table," Harjo starts. "No matter what, we must eat to live." Communion and community thread throughout her poem. "It is here," at a table, where "children are given instructions on what it means to be human."

Harjo thinks our end has been foretold: "We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here." Her poem concludes with resigned hope: "Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite." Her focus on a shared domestic space helps us forget about the enormity of the poem's backdrop.

Is Frost's poem a microcosm of Dante Alighieri's Inferno? Maybe. Yet I also like the origin story from astronomer Harlow Shapley: while Frost was a poet-in-residence at Harvard, he twice in one night asked Shapley how the world would end. Shapley's response formed the polarities of the poem.

Read by countless middle-school students in requisite units on American poetry, "Fire and Ice" is heavier than its nine lines appear at first glance, and like much of his other work, darkly comic. Equally apocalyptic in spirit, and perhaps even more final in its small-town sadness, is Frost's poem " Out, Out," which ends with a minor apocalypse: a boy's injury leads to amputation and then death, but the townspeople, "since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs."

The September 24, 2001, issue of The New Yorker had a black cover, and on its back page waited this poem. Zagajewski wrote the poem before 9/11, but like the verse of Yeats and Auden, sometimes words need to wait for their proper moment.

Note the evolution of the titular statement throughout the poem: we are called to "try to praise," and then "you must praise," "you should praise," and finally the exasperated, exhausted, and yet somehow calm final "Praise the mutilated world / and the gray feather a thrush lost, / and the gentle light that strays and vanishes / and returns." Zagajewski said there was not one particular event that birthed the poem, rather, "it's the way I have always seen the world" - on the brink, and yet beautiful.

Maybe we will be laughing at the end. Mary Karr seems to think so. "Warring factions" will set the date for the end of the world. Physicists will send "copies of the decree to paradise / in case God has anything to say." A lunar eclipse portends the end, and "Those who hated the idea stayed indoors" but will step out "onto porches and balconies to see / the human shapes twist and rise / through violet sky and hear trees uproot / with a sound like enormous zippers / unfastening."

Karr's lines unfurl toward hilarity and back again, and yet her lines capture quite what we'd expect an absent God to sound like as he watches his creation combust: "where the last spreadeagled Xs clung like insects, / then vanished in puffs of luminous smoke, // which traveled a long way to sting his nostrils, / the journey lasting more than ten lifetimes."

"Those who expected lightning and thunder / are disappointed" on the day the world ends. From bees circling clovers to fishermen mending nets to vegetable peddlers shouting in the street, the world moves on, unknowing of its end. We almost certainly will not know when the end will come, and Milosz especially thinks those who expect "signs and archangels' trumps" will be disappointed at the lack of ceremony.

If Harjo thinks our end is our beginning - or perhaps symbolic of one of our daily customs - then Milosz thinks our end will be a surprise for most. Except one: "Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet / Yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy, / Repeats while he binds his tomatoes: / No other end of the world will there be, / No other end of the world will there be."

Three iterations of the end of the world: Austin, Texas; New York, N.Y.; Okemah, Okla. In Austin, grackles line the pavement, "tails oil-black." Nobody calls out of work. Instead, they "just sleepwalked to the Red Pony Lounge and dropped into silence." There a man "reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out a bird." The narrator wants to wake it up. On the east coast, at lunchtime, the city smells sweet. Everyone hunts for one last taste. Even a "feuding couple falls silent in front of a window display of petit fours, chocolate tortes, marzipan apricots." Finally, in the Midwest, the animals slowly become strange. "Goldfish leap down the street's puddles. Hermit crabs scuttle over lawns, and cockatiels preen dirt from their wings." A horse gallops down the street. The narrator's dog "dives into her lap, and as the stars go black she is laughing."

All stories about the end of the world are really about the end of our own worlds, the little, often unnoticed deaths that surround us daily. Glück's poem has always felt strangely personal and interrogative for me. It begins with a bird's call during the "still world" of the winter, but then immediately becomes direct in the second stanza: "You wanted to be born; I let you be born. / When has my grief ever gotten / in the way of your pleasure?"

Later: "never imagining the sound of my voice / as anything but part of you- / ... only / persistent echoing / in all sound that means good-bye, good-bye." Is this a mother? Is it God? It might be both: creators alike, after all.

I love the skill and restraint needed to develop a poem in a single room - a motel room, no less. Who among us has not felt that his or her particular end would come in some aberrant motel room, "Korean monster movie on the SyFy channel, / lurid Dora the Explorer blanket draped tentlike / over Baby's portacrib to shield us from unearned / innocence." If we are to believe Pierce and others, the end will arrive with a bit of blurring: "Grease-dusted ceiling fan / paddles erratically, two spars missing. Sheets whirled / to the polluted rug." The family is splayed in this comfortably uncomfortable place: "My glasses on the side table / tipped onto scratchproof lenses, earpieces / sticking up / like arms out of disaster rubble. Your feet hooked over my feet. What miasma / lays gold dander down on forms of temporary / survivors wandering the promenade?" They are at peace in this "Sad Armageddon / of marriage: how pretty much nice / we meant to be, and couldn't make a difference."

We should lighten up a bit as we near the end of the list - a little poetic calm before the concluding storm. The narrator and his companions "stopped the car where the river curled," at what is called the end of the world. They "scrambled down" beneath a bridge, cross the "gravel track of a narrow ridge" and thread the woods to reach the actual river. The narrator stands alone where the "white water goosetailed with eddying swell." As in many of Gioia's poems, he brings us to the final resting place of the poem and then steps back. We are with the narrator at the end of this world, looking downstream, where "There was nothing but sky, / The sound of the water, and the water's reply."

This is how the world ends: at a circus. MacLeish's sonnet is actually a single swollen sentence. "Quite unexpectedly," it begins, as Vasserot, the "armless ambidextrian" lit a match between his toes, and the lion is biting a performer's neck - while the theater of the absurd reaches its pinnacle, "Quite unexpectedly the top blew off."

The final stanza is masterful, garbled, clunky, recursive, and as close as our inadequate minds can image to the real, messy end. Most likely then, above our paled faces and "our dazed eyes," there will be "nothing, nothing, nothing - nothing at all."
Image Credit: Pexels/ VH S.

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Enormous Zippers Unfastening: Ten Poems for the End of the World - The Millions

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We don't know when it will happen - whether some April or July or December will be the cruelest month - but we know poets are fascinated with the end of the world. Novelists and essayists ponder the apocalypse, but poems are particularly suited toward capturing the anxiety of the end.

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Various Writers

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Philip Levine

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Elly Bookman

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Schools gone dark. On the last day
we told the children to take everything
home, supervised as they emptied dark
lockers of books, loose pages, mirrors.
I don't drive past the dark windows and
halls, missing it. I make dark the living
room and fill it back up with the light of
a movie. Something about creatures who
stalk in the dark, thrive on its blankness.
But I go to bed before the end, when
dark returns to the screen with its list
of names. I sleep in dark, but shove
voices in my ears that belong to bodies
who sat in lit rooms a good while ago
to discuss science, loss. Even sunrises-
I sleep through them now, can't stand
that semi-dark slide into the worsened
day. Dark soil in the garden beds, in
the houseplants, spilled on the kitchen
floor. The dark fur of the dog so soft
I'd skin her to make myself a coat if I
didn't love the rest of her so desperately.
Dark thoughts like that in my head
all day. Dark mode so the screens are
gentler on the eyes. Not that they feel
any strain-no dark itch in the pupil.
If anything I feel so much the same-
no new humid night sets its dark down
in my swallow (the sickness), nor does
any heart-wound turn rotten and raw.
I am the dark's pale rider, indifferent
and slow. By the time schools reopen,
dark won't be anything on which to
remark. A girl will open her locker and
out dark will pour and she'll think how
she's learned it. Dark homework. Dark
that has spent all these days staring
into a left-behind mirror at itself, stirred
to cloud at last, to a downpour about
to make the day cool and blue, make all
this a yesterday. Her shadowy backpack.

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Schools gone dark. On the last daywe told the children to take everythinghome, supervised as they emptied darklockers of books, loose pages, mirrors.I don't drive past the dark windows andhalls, missing it. I make dark the livingroom and fill it back up with the light ofa movie.

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Robert Travers

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That day the sun rose as if
it was the most natural thing
in the world; as if the long lake
glaciers had dug in the hard

bed of a withered sea
would keep the sea's salt
buried forever like treasure;
as if the least you could expect

was for geese to swim through
blue air in a luminous shoal,
a great white mesh hauled
up the deep blue of the lake;

as if snow itself had hatched
a flock of fat flakes on the ground
and taught them how to fly
under their own steam; or as if

it should come as no surprise
to find yourself amazed,
between the salt and the sunlight,
catching snow-geese with your bare eyes.

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That day the sun rose as if it was the most natural thing in the world; as if the long lake glaciers had dug in the hard bed of a withered sea would keep the sea's salt buried forever like treasure; as if the least you could expect was for

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Audre Lorde

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New York

Audre Lorde

Smelling the Wind

Rushing headlong
into new silence
your face
dips on my horizon
the name
of a cherished dream
riding my anchor
one sweet season
to cast off
on another voyage

No reckoning allowed
save the marvelous arithmetics
of distance

This poem appears in Audre Lorde's collection The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (W. W. Norton & Company, 2000).
Beacons (2019) © Rico Gatson, MTA NYC Transit 167 St. Station.
Commissioned by MTA Arts & Design, Audre Lorde portrait derived from a photograph by Jack Mitchell. Photo by Seong Kwon.

You can purchase the volume here.

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New York Audre Lorde Smelling the Wind Rushing headlonginto new silenceyour face dips on my horizonthe name of a cherished dreamriding my anchorone sweet seasonto cast offon another voyage No reckoning allowedsave the marvelous arithmeticsof distance This poem appears in Audre Lorde's collection The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (W.

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W.S. Merwin

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During these trying days of social distancing, self-isolating and quarantines, days rife with fear and anxiety, my colleagues and I thought you might like some company. So each day we will be introducing you to poets we have met over the years. The only contagion they will expose you to is a measure of joy, reflection and meditation brought on by "the best words in the best order."
Enjoy.
- Bill Moyers

In this clip from Bill's 2009 interview with poet W.S. Merwin, he reads his poem "Rain Light." Merwin talked several times with Bill over the years. Access the full interview in our video archive.

"Rain Light"

All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question
even though the whole world is burning

- W.S. Merwin, from his Pulitzer-Prize winning book The Shadow of Sirius (Copper Canyon Press, 2008).

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A Poet a Day: W.S. Merwin Reads 'Rain Light'

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During these trying days of social distancing, self-isolating and quarantines, days rife with fear and anxiety, my colleagues and I thought you might like some company. So each day we will be introducing you to poets we have met over the years.