What Sparks Poetryis a series of original essays that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In our new series of Ecopoetry Now, poets engage in an ecopoetic conversation across borders. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay.
before you were born, gods traded in silences worked blood into earth, mud wombs hosting tiny hominid spines, ever fetal-chording serpents & seeds you, an eastbound bird brighteyed millennial, aluminum-husked god your own way from up there, grace sand with a stopover snickertini eyerolls behind glass just dust & towers tumbleweeding
naked eye babyblind to beyond
teeming life stories of particulate matter, nevermind pleistocene mollusksongs still circling
nevermind the first flood gilgamesh & his jigsaw heart necropoli of eternal youth each generation with brave new names breathless, bloodthirsty with hope
or oil rigs. drill bits spew flecks of black gold, nevermind hungry blue eyes, fine aqueous membranes perforated en route cocktailing sweet into brackish (so sorry)
nevermind only the poor know thirst
in the desert when sun sets on aurum & crude we still dream water afterdark confessions, coastlines eat their feelings fading memory of mangroves buried alive nevermind
last rites for dying coral
history is a weapon of mass destruction, you return to babylon
lounging against loot, pain- stakingly woven by brown hands trading fables with false idols, monopoly money, disneylands for gluttonous sheikhs
"In the petroleum economies of al Khaleej (as elsewhere), there exist micro-universes of so-called expats, a blossoming confusion of recent arrivals and longstanding, multi-generational clans, the newly affluent and then those others who live at the porous boundaries of the less desirable micro-universe of outsiders, migrant workers."
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"My favorite ritual is to get up and acknowledge the sun and this life. Then I ask for help, in whatever I am doing. I like to get up while I’m still asleep and to stay in that mode—a liminal mode between dreaming and wake—and just write without thinking. Often, that earliest stuff is rich, rich with the deep earth, where there’s both coal and diamonds."
This April, to celebrate National Poetry Month, we'll share popular writing prompts from our "What Sparks Poetry" essay series each morning. Write along with us!
Write a litany about what it is like to have or not have US citizenship in the 21st century. Using repetition for pattern and catalogue for expansion, pay particular attention to the mundane, to what you can or cannot take for granted, to whom/what you gain and whom/what you lose.
