☀ Today's Poem: "Letter to the Corinthians" Elizabeth Willis

January 7, 2025

When I was a child, my eye was older than an oak.

From the highest chair, I saw string beans move from my
brother's plate into my mother's mouth when my father looked
away. I watched my sister spit her peas behind the sink. A dog
moved from the woods toward the kitchen door. The house
unfolding like a book.

I read my father's secret history of anger, my mother's dissertation
on subterfuge, their parlor of doubt, the kitchen of their
discontent.

This was my host country and I its virus.

I witnessed a world that couldn't be explained. Rhymed and
unrhymed, its alien talk floated above a blanket of verse.

In time, I would adopt its pattern language. I would deliver its
messages like a page. I would spy with my little eye. I would open
and close like a camera.

In the stories of that planet, I would find no character resembling
myself, so I would place myself outside them, in a poem.

When I was a child, I hated lace; I buried all the dolls.

I hid in the snow and thought about what it would mean: to
disappear. A little ghost whispering help!, testing its alarms.

But when I was grown, I opened the box of broken dolls, and
when it was dark, I held the tree by its branches and all the
childish words rustled back into the woods, into the purple snow.

I knew there was a story larger than anything.

At the back of the lens, the end was already on fire.

from the book LIONTAMING IN AMERICA / New Directions

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Forward

I think children have a capacity to witness adult behavior systems with a kind of alien clarity. One of the phrases in the poem comes from a chapter in the biblical book of Corinthians, a passage that often sounds to me like poetry. To me it's a reminder that poems too may function prophetically; that belonging, home, and identity are shaped by language; and that the patterns we inherit are not immutable.

Elizabeth Willis on "Letter to the Corinthians"

Nick Ripatrazone on "When Dylan Thomas Tried to Get Spooky"

"Dylan Thomas once described God as 'the author, the milky-way farmer, the first cause, architect, lamp-lighter, quintessence, the beginning Word, the anthropomorphic bowler-out and black-baller, the stuff of all men, scapegoat, martyr, maker, woe-bearer.' At nineteen, suffused with Blake’s mysticism and something devilish, he wrote a horror story during Christmas. We will never know the exact mixture of the alchemy, but 'The Tree' is a staggering myth."

via LITERARY HUB

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Color image of the cover of Ranjit Hoskote's translation of Mir Taqi Mir's work, The Homeland's an Ocean

What Sparks Poetry: Ranjit Hoskote on Translation

"Mir’s voice speaks with clarity and urgency, with anguish and a timely critical resonance to our historical moment. His themes are our themes, his loss is our loss, his bewilderment is our bewilderment—the destroyed city, the devastated countryside, the scattering of friends, the exactions of exile. All these are features of our lives today, in a world marred by genocidal wars and forced migrations, invasions and insurrections, tanks and bulldozers, bombed cities and slaughtered populations."

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