☀ What Sparks Poetry: Melissa Kwasny on "Sleeping with the Cedars"

Categories: Poems | Poetry Age: 7 until 13 year 14 until 18 year 19 until 30 year 31 until 64 years 65 and older

1 year ago

Html
Text

It is only because of individuals like you that we are able to promote contemporary poets, translators, presses, and journals each and every day. A gift of any amount will enable us to continue our mission.

donate

April 17, 2023

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.

Sleeping with the Cedars

Melissa Kwasny

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

READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM

Forward

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.'"

READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE

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

READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES

Write with Poetry Daily
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. Evie Shockley

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.
© 2023 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030
Design by the Binding Agency

Share on

Other newsletters from Poems.com

☀ Today's Poem: "My Faith Unfolds Itself" Alafia Nicole Sessions Poems.com
2 hours ago
Help poetry thrive where it's needed most Poems.com
14 hours ago
☀ Today's Poem: "Sonorous" Chus Pato Poems.com
Yesterday at 11:30

More newsletters from Poems.com

Related newsletters

View other categories

Poems | Poetry