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Night Poem, Leila Chatti

It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, Anne de Marcken

[ID: I pretended everything would be okay because it seemed impossible to always be saying goodbye. To blueberries. To the ocean. To ravens. To pelicans and plovers. To the cormorants. To the sunlight on the living room wall at four o'clock. To the sound of you in the next room. /end ID]

The Moon That Turns You Back, Hala Alyan

Years ago, I received a query from a prominent editor about a line in Mahmoud Darwish’s long poem, “The ‘Red Indian’s’ Penultimate Speech to the White Man,” (If I Were Another). The poem channels Chief Seattle’s voice and spirit. In the poem’s second section, the line in question follows an address to Columbus, “the free [who] has the right to find India in any sea, / and the right to name our ghosts as pepper or Indian.”

The line in question is this: “You have burst seventy million hearts…enough, / enough for you to return from our death as monarch of the new time”:

“I just don’t get where he got the seventy million from?” the editor asked.

I didn’t reply. I didn’t wonder about the accuracy of Darwish’s claim. Maybe he included all the Natives annihilated in the Americas over the centuries. The only thought I had in my head was, “Is this really what’s bothering you about the poem?”

Years later, in a daydream, a marginalia of my soul visited me, and it spoke thus: “Do you remember those seventy million punctured hearts in Darwish’s poem? If you’re ever asked again, if the person who asks you says that historical studies show the number is not possible or whatever, remember the buffalos.”

The buffalo hearts are also native hearts. Who will count the donkeys, dogs, and cats in Gaza? The birds will return.

— Fady Joudah, in his essay “A Palestinian Meditation in a Time of Annihilation”

[ID: “Temporary Job” by Minnie Bruce Pratt

Leaving again. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t be / grieving. The particulars of place lodged in me, / like this room I lived in for eleven days, / how I learned the way the sun laid its palm / over the side window in the morning, heavy / light, how I’ll never be held in that hand again.]

Litany against anthropocentrism

[ID: A photo of an excerpt from the book "A Natural History of the Future". The excerpt reads: "-affirmation. "I am large in a world of small species. I am multi-cellular in a world of single-celled species. I have bones in a world of boneless species. I am named in a world of nameless species. Most of what is knowable is not yet known. " End ID]

Lee Hyemi, tr. Soje, Ligature Marks.

David Whyte in conversation with Krista Tippett, On Being [transcript in ALT]

[Image description: text that says:

"Whyte: Yes, I mean, I went back into poetry because I felt like scientific language wasn't precise enough to describe the experiences that I had in Galapagos. Science, rightly, is always trying to remove the "I." But I was really interested in the way that the "I" deepened, the more you paid attention. And in Galapagos I began to realize that because I was in deeply attentive states, hour after hour, watching animals and birds and landscapes - and that's all I did for almost two years - I began to realize that my identity depended, not upon any beliefs I had, inherited beliefs or manufactured beliefs, but my identity actually depended on how much attention I was paying to things that were other than myself, and that as you deepen this intentionality and this attention, you started to broaden and deepen your own sense of presence."

End description.]

— Lucille Clifton, “why some people be mad at me sometimes,” The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton: 1965-2010 (BOA Edtions Ltd., 2021)

When I was little I sat for hours on the dirt earth, among the animals. Before the house, lost inside. I had no body, then. Or, when I shut my eyes. But everything is changed. I am more beautiful, sometimes, traveling, but also nearer, more animal.

— Cynthia Cruz, from “Fragment: The Earth Like a Golden Goblet Over Whose Rim the Golden Ripples of the Moon Foamed,” Hotel Oblivion

in the haze and fog of insects and dying stars once all my choices were proven wrong in the crinkling grass in the shining moss up high once a mountain taught me my bones and breath taught me to breathe once I learned from a mountain how to leave

Leslie Harrison, from “[Once]”, The Book of Endings

[Text ID: The light has changed; / middle C is tuned darker now. / And the songs of morning sound over-rehearsed. / This is the light of autumn, not the light of spring. / The light of autumn: you will not be spared. / End ID]

“ WHAT I AM NOT

My brother and I used to play a game. I’d point to a chair. “THIS IS NOT A CHAIR,” I’d say. Bird would point to the table. “THIS IS NOT A TABLE.” “THIS IS NOT A WALL,” I’d say. “THAT IS NOT A CEILING.” We’d go on like that. “IT IS NOT RAINING OUT.” “MY SHOE IS NOT UNTIED!” Bird would yell. I’d point to my elbow. “THIS IS NOT A SCRAPE.” Bird would lift his knee. “THIS IS ALSO NOT A SCRAPE!” “THAT IS NOT A KETTLE!” “NOT A CUP!” “NOT A SPOON!” “NOT DIRTY DISHES!” We denied whole rooms, years, weathers. Once, at the peak of our shouting, Bird took a deep breath. At the top of his lungs, he shrieked: “I! HAVE NOT! BEEN! UNHAPPY! MY WHOLE! LIFE!” “But you’re only seven,” I said.”

— Nicole Krauss, The History Of Love

“Where is the horse? Where the rider? Where the giver of treasure? Where the seats of the feast? Where are the joys of the hall? Alas for the bright cup! Alas for the heroic warrior! Alas for the splendor of the king! How they have passed away, Dark under night-cover, As if they never were.” - The Wanderer, An Anglo-Saxon poem of lamentation, which was the inspiration for Tolkien’s Lament of the Rohirrim. (via het-stille-woud)

Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

[ID: Screenshotted text reads

“Say surrender. Say alabaster. Switchblade.      Honeysuckle. Goldenrod. Say autumn. Say autumn despite the green      in your eyes. Beauty despite daylight. Say you’d kill for it. Unbreakable dawn     mounting in your throat. My thrashing beneath you     like a sparrow stunned with falling.”

I hold my honey and I store my bread In little jars and cabinets of my will. I label clearly, and each latch and lid I bid, Be firm till I return from hell. I am very hungry. I am incomplete. And none can tell when I may dine again. No man can give me any word but Wait, The puny light. I keep eyes pointed in; Hoping that, when the devil days of my hurt Drag out to their last dregs and I resume On such legs as are left me, in such heart As I can manage, remember to go home, My taste will not have turned insensitive To honey and bread old purity could love.

-Gwendolyn Brooks, ”my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell“

My blood? I’ve fed it to the turtles, to the berries

to anything hungry and wanting. All you had to do

was ask.

I always had what you wanted, didn’t I?

— Elizabeth Schmuhl, “#94,” Premonitions