☀ Today's Poem: "Blue" Hussain Ahmed

Today's Headline: Sylvia Plath's "Legacy of Grief, Haunting Poetry and Surprising Resilience"

February 15, 2025 Blue Hussain Ahmed The Mediterranean remains blue across centuries of swallowing. Because it is not a cemetery, it does not date its memories. On the sky is a diary that catalogued the bodies lost to the sea. In the language of a gong, water clashed against the rocks, an elegy to the fish that embalmed our dead inside their cold bodies. After the new millennium, I learned to forget what I cannot save. A seed vault was built outside a deserted city—obscured with grief, I searched for familiar faces from the shadows on the walls. Now, every song in a foreign tongue sounds like a prayer. from the book BLUE EXODUS / Orison Books READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM Share Tweet Forward "Blue" reminisces with the past but also reconciles the reality of living in Oxford, Mississippi, in the middle of the pandemic. I envisioned home with the lens that is getting used to a new landscape. In those days, I relied upon prayers I've known all my life, I relied on music I loved, but during the isolation, I discovered many more songs in languages I wish I could pray in. Hussain Ahmed on "Blue" Sylvia Plath's "Legacy of Grief, Haunting Poetry and Surprising Resilience" "Her writings, and her death, have since been taken together as a coming-of-age story for the misunderstood young woman. Countless biographers have promised explanations for her life and death, and her novel The Bell Jar has served as a pop culture prop in movies and TV shows like 10 Things I Hate About You and 'Sex Education.'" via SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES What Sparks Poetry: Farid Matuk on Language as Form "I wanted this work to be accountable, to not settle for easy truisms about ambiguity or a lack of closure being liberatory or even interesting. I wanted, more than I had before, to risk being right or wrong or foolish or earnest or stylized. I don't know who to face, but in wanting to be accountable the poems call—a bit desperately, really—to readers I can't yet see. My ambition was to create across each poem and again across the book a complex of feelings, sometimes contradictory feelings, that would get at what's irreconcilable about the real." READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE donate View in browser You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com. If you would like to unsubscribe please click here. © 2025 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030 Design by the Binding Agency

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