Sanna Wani
 
Sometimes remembering refuses us. Sometimes I’m
a shoreline the water of memory drags its palm across.

—Billy-Ray Belcourt
In a daisy field. In a garden. In a graveyard, in the sun, its valley.
In the sound of nothing. Your mother and father, two trees
in the distance. In the distance. In the sound of the whistle,
someone banishing you again. A hand in the distance, a greeting.

In a greeting, a question. How old are you? Six? Seventeen?
In your body, aging, an immediacy. A flower, a new arm.
Eat the apple. Your lips redden. The person you were,
you are always becoming. Their breath spilling over

your neck. A breath, a shore, a whistle, a knife. Where is the wind?
In love, the wounds you tend. A wound, a door, a lake, a fence.
Whatever is perpendicular to your becoming. Time is a terrible statue.
The tide will eat its skin. To prevent heartbreak, practice disappearing.

All the eels are missing. You are an expert in missing. A mouth,
a lock, a gate, a key. Open your mouth and throw the word yet
into the river. Into the river, your face leaking glass. A face,
a flood, a crystal, a dove. Someday, you will be in love again.

The sun, a wound on your windowsill. Light falls
on your dreams. It sounds like someone knocking.
from the journal THE PURITAN
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This poem was written after recalling a memory. When I was six, I went to Gulmarg with my parents. There was a daisy field beside an old graveyard, in front of an army base. I insisted we stop. We walked through the flowers until, behind us, a paramilitary officer fired a warning shot into the air. It said, "You are not allowed to be here." It said, "Leave." I lifted my hand to say, "I understand" or maybe, "Stop." My mother yanked it down. My father says I was seventeen, not six. He says there was no gunshot, just a whistle. It was a year of trauma. The memory repressed me and I became a child again. It was the only way I could remember.

Sanna Wani on "Memory is Sleeping"
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