Until further notice Poetry Daily will devote Wednesdays to What Keeps Us, an impromptu series featuring poems that sustain and uplift through trying times. We thank you for reading and hope that you will share poems with your friends and neighbors. Please be well.
Skin remembers how long the years grow when skin is not touched, a gray tunnel of singleness, feather lost from the tail of a bird, swirling onto a step, swept away by someone who never saw it was a feather. Skin ate, walked, slept by itself, knew how to raise a see-you-later hand. But skin felt it was never seen, never known as a land on the map, nose like a city, hip like a city, gleaming dome of the mosque and the hundred corridors of cinnamon and rope.
Skin had hope, that's what skin does. Heals over the scarred place, makes a road. Love means you breathe in two countries. And skin remembers—silk, spiny grass, deep in the pocket that is skin's secret own. Even now, when skin is not alone, it remembers being alone and thanks something larger that there are travelers, that people go places larger than themselves.
Carol Rumens finds renewed contemporary significance for Irina Ratushinskaya's "The Sparrows of Butyrka." "Ratushinskaya’s poem contains a premonition that was to come true: 'The real trial lies ahead.' And yet it determinedly lives in the moment. 'Let overwhelmed reason go' is the vital, even spiritual, commandment."
Resources for Supporting and Uplifting the Black Community
The Community Justice Action Fund: "The Community Justice Action Fund is changing the conversation on gun violence prevention by leading with the people closest to the pain of everyday gun violence."
African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund: "The National Trust and its partners are working to raise $25 million to create and invest in the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund—the largest preservation campaign ever undertaken on behalf of African American history."
The Harriet Tubman Collective:"A Collective of Black Deaf & Black Disabled organizers, community builders, activists, dreamers, lovers striving for radical inclusion and collective liberation."
Poetry Daily stands with the Black community. We oppose racism, oppression, and police brutality. We will continue to amplify diverse voices in the poetry world. Black Lives Matter.
"I thought about the future—and the shores my daughter would stand on—every time we played in water. Play with a young child is always about the objects themselves, but at the same time always seems somehow allegorical. A story unfolds. Ideas about the world are exposed: Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub…."
