Poem of the Week

Our third poem of the week this April is “Opening” by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Dub: Finding Ceremony, in which “Opening” is published, takes inspiration from theorist Sylvia Wynter, dub poetry, and ocean life to offer a catalog of possible methods for remembering, healing, listening, and living otherwise.

if you gathered them they would be everyone.

gather them.

recognize in them your jawline, your wet eyes, your long-fingered
hands, seeking what but this multitude. if you gathered them they
would not fit on this island. they would spill back into the ocean
whence they came. when you gather them they will have fins and
claws and names you do not know.

gather them anyway.

some will look you in the eye, some are too microscopic to see. if you
don’t gather them all you will never be free. if you gathered them you
could not hold them, scold them, demand back what you think is
lost. gather them today or your soul is the cost. gather the ones who
sold and who bought and who tossed overboard. gather the erstwhile
children in the name of the lord. gather the unclaimed fathers, the
ones with guns and with swords. gather them up. with your hands.
with your relationship to land. with your chin set. you are not done
yet. you never will.

gather them more. gather them still.

they will unfound you and surround you unfind you and unwind you
travel to you unravel through your own needle. gather the thread.
collect your dead.

put yourself in the center and draw them in. stand where you standing which is not under and not over. you. not gonna get over it. and
where you stand is not always standing either, is it? sometimes quicksand sometimes bended knee, very often that cross-legged thing you
do, sitting on the floor or hugging your own legs like they were people. be where you are and draw them to you. you might need to move
your hands, one of those legs or a book from blocking your heart.
that would be a good start. put your arms out like if you were floating in water. daughter. they know where to find you.

this is what we did. we put everything where it needed to go. we
knew about need by intuition. we knew about need by experience.
we knew about need by not needing what we thought we needed. we
needed you to know something else. so this is what we did. we knotted up our knowing with our needing. we kneaded back our needing
into notthisnotthennotagain and we knew the net of our needing,
the need of our knowing would wander and would wait. we knew it
like we knew salt. we knew it like we knew bait. we know it like we
know you. don’t hesitate.

first, the sound. you hear it even if no one else does. even if you wake
and already don’t remember. second, the seconds. you feel the up-tick
in your heart bringing you back into time. third, the rise. as if you are
pulled vertical across the floor and before you know it you have taken
several steps. it is a minute or so before you are you as you know you.
in the rising you could be any of us.

save the top of your head for the water. don’t let the nonsense burn it
out. cleanse with salt and coolness. thousands of years ago it was a
spout. place your head in places worthy. place your hands over your
heart. bless yourself with generations. that’s a start.

what the coral said:
breathe. breathe. breathe. sing. let that water move within you. let it
be you. let your every cilia dance you into healing. let the warm salt
water brighten you. your tears. sleep. and when you dream of working, sleep again. sleep until you dream of floating. dream until your
edges soft. dream until you birth yourself in water singing with the
bones of all your lost. dream until you breathe not from your mouth,
not from your nose but through your hair and through your skin.
dream until you claim the ocean. breathe until you feel no need to
swim. breathe until your dreams flow out your brain. breathe and let
them in your heart. breathe and we will call you again. that’s a start.

there are very few things that you must do. this is one. this will show
you the others. there is a difference between assignment and need.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a poet, independent scholar, and activist. She is the author of Dub, Spill, and M Archive, all published by Duke University Press. Alexis is a 2023 Windham-Campbell Prize Winner in Poetry. She was a 2020-2021 National Humanities Center Fellow, funded by the Founders Award, and is a 2022 National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellow.

Poem of the Week

It’s currently National Poetry Month, so we are offering a poem each Monday throughout April. Today’s poem is from Leah Zani’s forthcoming book, Bomb Children. Joshua O. Reno, author of Waste Away: Working and Living with a North American Landfill says “Bomb Children is nothing short of breathtaking. Leah Zani presents little-known and incredibly important material on the everyday aftermath of the Secret War for the people of Laos. Her topic is not only ethnographically underexplored, but has been deliberately concealed by the U.S. government for decades. In Zani’s hands, fieldwork becomes a flexible toolkit, selectively and strategically deployed to grasp the object of military wasting in a revealing and ethically responsible way.”

Leah Zani is a Junior Fellow in the Social Science Research Network at University of California, Irvine. Bomb Children will be published in August.

Our other highlighted poems can be read here.

Poem of the Week

April is National Poetry Month, so we are offering a poem each Monday for the next four weeks. Today’s poem is from Rafael Campo’s latest book, Comfort Measures Only: New and Selected Poems, 1994-2016. Campo, a physician, writes from his work and life experience with great empathy. Martin Espada says, “The luminous language and the luminous vision offer proof that poetry, too, is a healing art, that storytelling is medicinal. In these times, we need poets of eloquent empathy more than ever, and there is no poet more eloquent or empathetic than Rafael Campo.”

As We Die

My parents gripe about their health. I think
about when I was young, and tried to force
from them an explanation of — what else
could it have been, but death? Back then, the ink

that clotted in my mother’s brush was black
as my ungrateful, doubting soul; my father’s
huge plush armchair, tilted slightly back, offered
what seemed eternal rest. Their talk is bleak,

their diverticulosis like a pit
that swallows them, their heart disease an ache
these old emotions only aggravate.
I guess I look to them as giants yet,

immortals who know secrets I cannot.
My father, hard of hearing now, reclines
a little farther back; her face now lined
with years of pain, my mother jabs at knots

of garish sunflowers, pretending we
might yet avoid the conversations that
have made their marks on us. Not what I thought —
past death, at last, dreams keep us perfectly.

Rafael Campo is the author of six books of poetry with Duke University Press. He is Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Poem of the Week by Rafael Campo

We conclude our Poetry Month series today with a poem by Rafael Campo, from his 2007 collection The Enemy. In addition to being a poet, Campo is also a doctor at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. In this poem, he wonders about the stranger accidentally caught in a photo of him and his partner.

Ode to the Man Incidentally Caught in the Photograph of Us on My Desk

At first, you look determined, sunglasses
protecting your imaginary blue,
and therefore possibly sensitive, eyes.
You don’t seem like the others, arms askew,
heads angled, asses in the air—you march
as if you think that life depended on
your mission. Out of focus, on the beach
we have our backs to, maybe it’s forgone
to you, the heartening conclusion that
humanity must still be worth your care.
Around you teems the world at play, too fat,
too innocent, too broken to repair.
Much time has passed; the cheerful photograph
of us seems marred by your demeanor now,
as if the years of heedless frozen laughs
had changed your mind, as if you always knew
that any love was treacherous, that all
was somehow lost. Irretrievable friend,
your vaguely handsome face yet dutiful,
bear witness to us, even in the end.

Copyright Rafael Campo, 2007.

 

 

Poem of the Week

Our Poetry Month series continues today with a poem from a forthcoming collection of Cuban poetry edited and translated by Margaret Randall. Covering eight decades and featuring the work of over fifty poets from diverse backgrounds born between 1902 and 1981, Only the Road / Solo el Camino is the most complete bilingual anthology of Cuban poetry available to an English readership. The following poem is by Milena Rodríguez Gutiérrez, who was born in Havana in 1971. She currently lives in Granada, Spain. Hers is one of several poems in the collection focusing on islands.

Innocence among the Waves

Islands are children’s toys,
balls someone tosses
upon the waves.
Sometimes, in the middle of the game,
the islands deflate
and you must blow, blow
until you fall into the water.
Then, who knows
if the island or you are the toy,
if we float exhausted
or it’s the island that’s bored
with the game of blowing,
with having to pump us up again.

Inocencia entre las olas

Las islas son juguetes para niños,
pelotas que alguien lanza
en medio de las olas.
En pleno juego, a veces,
las islas se desinflan
y hay que soplar, soplar
hasta caer rendidos sobre el agua.
Entonces, no se sabe
si el juguete es la isla o uno mismo,
si aquí estamos tendidos por cansancio,
o acaso es que la isla ya se aburre
del juego de soplar,
de tener que volver a echarnos aire.

Copyright Duke University Press, 2016.

Only the Road/ Solo el Camino will be available in October 2016. If you are interested in reviewing the book or would like to consider it for your fall courses, you can view an advance copy on NetGalley.