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What Sparks Poetry is 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.
Smaller than hours and waves, I lie 
in their shade. Daubed with their paste. A form 
of peace in the island green of mourning.

When I graduate, my mother used to say,
one of our little jokes. To graduate, a step by
step affair. The silence is like a bronze 

age bell tolling. Announcing her death, which 
I know of already, or declaring a new
phase. In order for the community to gather.

In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, 
Osiris waits in the dark to burst forth, hitting air 
as a swallow, a falcon, a craftsman, a snake,

a lotus, but never a tree. My mother complained 
that I dress like a widow, my hair like bark
or ash and that I intentionally neglect to brush it. 

It is instead the shyness of those most favored
that makes me hide, like pigment blended
with water and spread across the surface of a sky

made to wrinkle and absorb it. Wake me, 
let me walk again, the dead plead in the Egyptian 
hymns. As my mother did when she was alive.

Lift your eyes. Can you find the one branch
wavering in the Forest of No Wind? 
Strong emotion must leave its trace, the writers say.

The painters know, within the trunks of cedar,
there are many carved wooden rooms, 
sunlight pouring forth from doors they left ajar.
from the book THE CLOUD PATH / Milkweed Editions
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Milkweed Editions' logo of a blue butterfly on a white ground: Melissa Kwasny's new book, in which Sleeping with the Cedars appears, is forthcoming from Milkweed.
What Sparks Poetry:
Melissa Kwasny on "Sleeping with the Cedars"

"Most of us are frightened of the future and grief stricken at what humans have done to the earth. As I see it, one of the unique tasks of poets, especially at this time, is to be in imaginative relation with the Earth. And to use language as a tool toward that effort. To have an imaginative—as opposed to an abstract or intellectual—relationship with the earth is to be in attendance to what Denise Levertov called 'other forms of life that want to live.'"
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Color photograph of Solmaz Sharif sitting on a dilapidated flight of stairs against a wall of graffitti
An Interview with Solmaz Sharif

"I’ve never felt at home anywhere. And I think that’s a very ordinary existential crisis. My entry happens to be this material reality of two nations that are very clear 'enemies' and that ask for clear and rehearsed allegiances. And all of that feels false to me. This has led to larger questions of: what is the state of exile? What are the various shelters that this questing and that language itself may be able to offer to us?"

via THE GUARDIAN
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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 poem in which you use enumeratio [a listing of parts, details, causes, effects, etc.] to strengthen an argument, by bringing into view the constituent parts of something that concerns you and making those elements vivid and memorable. Play with structures of repetition that will juice your language and unlock your imagination.
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