Maya C. Popa
I wouldn't be who I am
if I could bear the foliage,

the hour losing
its precious light

like a knight bleeding out
through a hole in the armor.

I wouldn't be, if I could,
any more than that—

light on burnt leaves
while the hurt worked

its anchor, the chain eased
slowly like a tongue,

a word for grief that
doesn't rhyme with thief.

Any day now, autumn.
Winter any day.

I've shot my arrow
and lived by its arc

and still, the hours
won't acquit.

The first time we met
we said goodbye,

then we never stopped
saying it
from the book WOUND IS THE ORIGIN OF WONDER / W. W. Norton & Company
READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM
Share Share
Tweet Tweet
Forward Forward
Color headshot of Courtney Faye Taylor
Amaud Jamaul Johnson Talks to Courtney Faye Taylor

"There are some experiences and truths that I need the reader to see. That’s what I love about visual poetics. It’s a form that uses concrete imagery as language. There’s a visual poem that’s broken up across Concentrate that uses pictures of Black women and girls that I found on missing persons flyers....In that poem, I’m really thinking about the violence of being forgotten, but also about the violence of being reduced to stereotypical characteristics." 

via POETRY FOUNDATION
READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES
What Sparks Poetry:
David Hinton on Li Po's "Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon"


"I’ve found that translating classical Chinese poetry is a way for me to make contemporary poetry that operates outside of the Western cosmological or mythological system, even so far as to register a very different sense of what the self is. In this poetry, identity can be so much a part of the empirical world that it actually becomes landscape." 
READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE
View in browser

You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com
If you would like to unsubscribe please click here.

© 2022 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030

Design by the Binding Agency