What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In our fifth series, What Translation Sparks, a group of poet-translators share a seminal experience in translation. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay.
Black hair like youth Runs wild in March. Dark papery leaves fly Teeming, swarming, Bum-rushing March.
Black hair in March Is gentle, strangers' eyes Softer. Memory: A feast on offer. Youth, Born of the primordial sea— Embrace me. Drape my skin Old as clouds In something suppler.
Black hair Blown free, rootless, Wanders the desert's Countless tombs, sways Across a vacant sky, Whips at fresh mud in rain. Days blaze past. I have Lost sight of my own black hair In the mirror. Let me Watch it now For the next thousand years.
Black hair weedy In dirt-poor soil. Thirsty, deluded, Squandering its spoils. Black hair has no idea.
The story of black hair Is my story. When I die, let me drift Like a dandelion Of black hair.
Black hair Like holy water. No way, there is no way To be saved except to die. When black hair cries, Its tears snuff themselves out Like candles. So will my life cease to flicker.
Black hair Exhausted brush fire Fanned by misery Whistling Through the last century.
Black hair, Shredded black flag Of a woman's glory, Ragged and battered In March wind. Forsaking dignity Absolved of chastity With its pride in knots Black hair smiles easily In March.
If waterfall, it will plummet. If cloud, it will scatter.
Eyes plaintive, wide, Black hair waits to be spun By hardened hands Into rock
"Working on the poem, I saw clearly how the recurring image of black hair signifies within the specific context of Asian femininity, and yet in my hands—in my mouth—the phrase “black hair” began to make space for a second set of values and vulnerabilities as informed by my racially specific experience."
"Into his poetic diction went the unchanneled, the inarticulable and unfeelable, the wild energy of a mind for which his circumscribed Dublin life provided no run-off. His language bristles with that electric charge, with a life-force that is so beyond what is usually required by the quotidian business of life that I have to read it as the kind of place where most of us, if we are so inclined, would locate our most intense passions, our keenest, fiercest, least paraphrasable selves."
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.
