After my daughter died, her mother would tell me how she came to her in a dream, my mother would come to me with a similar telling. Grandmother too. What we all had in common was that we all couldn’t be there when she was being buried. I, bounded by distance, and them, unfortunately, by tradition. I didn’t have any solace that goodbye could offer. I was jealous, in my hurt. Jealous that they saw her dead. Jealous that mother washed her body in the Muslim ceremonial ritual bathe of the dead. Jealous of whoever closed my child's eyes, jealous of whoever saw her dead, saw her being buried. And this poem is not a lamentation of absence, but a yearning for reach through language, through appellation, even if only one from a dream.
Saddiq Dzukogi on "Ba Shi, Ba Shi" |
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The Accidental Poet: Mark Wunderlich
"One doesn’t really know when a poem is finished. I stop working on a poem when I feel I have cut away the fat, when the poem shows me something I didn’t know existed before I wrote it, or when I get bored with it, or when I think it’s not going to work, and then I put it on a heap to be salvaged for parts at some later date."
via DOOR COUNTY PULSE |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Dana Levin on Emily Kendal Frey's Lovability
"In Lovability, poem after poem seeks discernment against this agony, to untangle the sticky web of the imagined, the hoped for, the dreaded, the real, and encounter each unbraced. Perhaps this is the only project that matters. Perhaps it’s one of the most difficult things a person undergoes: the dismantling of dream, assumption, expectation, prejudice, in order to see clearly and honestly." |
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