Hussain Ahmed
    I.

The sky is a rolag, carded with grief and dew.

We were made in the image of our dead –

 
because God relies on recycling

to keep the earth going around the sun.

 
        II.

Each of my father's eyes is a globe of brown worms,

or bulb of sperm cells swimming towards an egg in search for light.

 
He no longer reads the Qur'an without his glasses.

This ritual of whirling in the first rain has no origin story.

 
        III.

Today, the sky looked freshly molded from clay,

I jumped inside the rain with my hands raised to the sky.

 
No one stays in it for long, so it doesn't unmake the scars

on our heads – healing and almost forgotten.

 
        IV.

The puddle sometimes gets large, it drags a child away.

 
Everyone lost to the water was recovered without their eyes,

that's how I know that fish love to swallow whatever resembles a lamp.
from the journal FOUR WAY REVIEW
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In "Cosmology of the Cloud with Baba as the Rainmaker," memory was a tool that bonded the collage of moments in which water or rainfall denotes a form of grieving. As a child, bathing in the first rain of every new season was how we thought to attract fortune of the season, until we suffered flooding or lost friends to water-related disasters.
Stylised illustration of Emiliy Dickinson
"An Alleged Lock of Emily Dickinson’s Hair is Selling for $450,000"

"Perhaps it’s ungenerous to indict [James] Merrill for his purported collegiate heist of [Emily] Dickinson memorabilia nearly a century ago. Many people do stupid, ill-advised things as undergraduates." 

via LITERARY HUB
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Cover of Denise Levertov's book of essays, The Poet in the World
What Sparks Poetry: 
Aaron McCollough on Denise Levertov's The Poet In The World

"We are, as she says, 'living our whole lives in a state of emergency' and therefore have no choice but to resist the petty politics of disenfranchisement peddled by nationalist revanchism and instead to embrace a truly radical form of conservatism—the effort to 'save that earthly life, that miracle of being, which poetry conserves and celebrates.'"
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