What I saw there; the grasses streams trees rivers stones mountains the pale orange crystal pulled from the rock face the wayward clots of white and lavender clouds
luminescent jellyfish the inlet criss-crossed by birds the silver sheen of water children marking it with fists
and winds unbound by municipal borders sheltering me tender heartedly needle-nose pines in a damp field stinging the air covetous old knots on a string still tied to my grandfather’s big toe in Shandong rough and green flowers falling in a long tradition over his body and my father straining his red-tipped ears towards an American middle ground the dark sermon of those early years crisis of distance and wild power of my mother— wild new discipline that nonetheless held back feverishly her tongue
"At the end of the poem, Brown abandons the language of myth to speak directly about slavery: ‘No one has to convince us./The people of my country believe/We can’t be hurt if we can be bought.’ For Black Americans, as for Ganymede, the way to heaven, or in this case a promised land, is via violence and coercion."
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"Writing Devi’s poems into English—I guess I mostly believe that Benjamin was right: even the original poem is a ‘translation’ of an experience past language—made me a writer of poems nothing like the poems I myself wrote. They were poems of great despair, of great rage, emotions ordinarily thought of perhaps as ‘negative;’ certainly they were emotions and feelings that I myself was only just beginning to explore in my own work."
