Yalie Kamara
While sipping coffee in my mother’s Toyota, we hear the birdcall of two teenage boys
in the parking lot: Aiight, one says, Besaydoo, the other returns, as they reach
for each other. Their cupped handshake pops like the first, fat, firecrackers of summer,

their fingers shimmy as if they’re solving a Rubik’s cube just beyond our sight. Moments
later, their Schwinns head in opposite directions. My mother turns to me, revealing the
milky, John-Waters-mustache-thin foam on her upper lip, Wetin dem bin say?

Besaydoo? Nar English? she asks, tickled by this tangle of new language. Alright.
Be safe dude, I pull apart each syllable like string cheese for her. Oh yah, dem nar real padi,
she smiles, surprisingly broken by the tenderness expressed by what half my family might call

thugs. Besaydoo. Besaydoo. Besaydoo, we chirp in the car, then nightly into our phones
after I leave California. Besaydoo, she says as she softly muffles the rattling of my bones
in newfound sobriety. Besaydoo, I say years later, her response made raspy by an oxygen

treatment at the ER. Besaydoo, we whisper to each other across the country. Like
some word from deep in a somewhere too newborn-pure for the outdoors, but we
saw those two boys do it, in broad daylight, under a decadent, ruinous, sun.
from the journal THE ADROIT JOURNAL
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“Besaydoo” documents and archives the sonic dimensions of care. While this poem is sourced from a memory that is several years old, its wonder remains—how often do we witness loved ones sealing each other’s departure with blessings? What happens when we rise to the challenge of integrating that love into our own lives? This poem meditates on the ways that language heals the ravages of time, distance, and circumstance.
Color illustration of Paul Celan
"A Word, A Corpse"

"Celan cleansed the language by breaking it down, bringing it back to its roots, creating a radical strangeness in expression and tone. Drawing on the vocabulary of such fields as botany, ornithology, geology, and mineralogy, and on medieval or dialect words that had fallen out of use, he invented a new form of German, reconceiving the language for the world after Auschwitz."

viaTHE NEW YORKER
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What Sparks Poetry:
Jennifer Grotz on "Pantarheia"  

"What is it we’re actually influenced by when we read or translate from other languages? One answer lies in what the late critic Daniel Albright called panaesthetics, a sort of belief that certain universal principles might unite artists or the process of making, regardless of medium or language. But another answer might be that we go to the work of other languages or other art forms in order to escape an influence or given tendency that our own language and tradition may exert on our making."
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