[To read an introduction to this column, please see the first paragraph of the previous post here]
This week I will simply share two poems from one of my favorite contemporary poets, Solmaz Sharif. Much of her work can be found online, but these two poems feel similar to me and are both striking in many ways. Here they are below:
“I Go by She”
I wear sunflower dresses
and draw black triangles on my eyes.
I love the smell of vanilla and honey
and the sparkle of stars in the moonlight.
So how can I blame anyone for assuming
my apparent femininity equates to womanhood?
I refer to myself as she not out of identity but out of
passivity. Of course I’m a woman, I look like one.
I’m not a man but I don’t think I would complain
if tomorrow I awoke in the body of one.
Rather I think I’d feel the same; a stark indifference
to the very concept of my identity would not be new.
Perhaps that is my identity, indifference.
Because man I don’t think I feel like a woman
but nonbinary is reserved for short hair and androgyny.
I wonder
If I cut my hair and wore loose clothes
threw out my dresses and stopped wearing makeup
would I feel comfortable identifying with the identity
that I feel comfortable with? Would I feel comfortable
escaping the binary and asking to be called they?
Would shedding my identity allow me to be true to it?
But I love my hair, my tight clothes and flowing skirts.
I enjoy my femininity yet feel disconnected from womanhood.
So I don’t have a clue what my preferred pronouns are,
but I go by she.
[To read an introduction to this column, please see the first paragraph of the previous post here]
This week I would like to share a poem I found recently from the Nigerian poet Gbenga Adesina. The following poem I discovered in the Fall 2020 issue of Narrative magazine. It is titled “Across the Sea: A Sequence”:
Across the Sea: A Sequence
Gbenga Adesina
1.
Across the Sea
The bottom of the sea is cruel. — Hart Crane.
i
On the sea, your prayer is not to the whorl scarf
of waves. Your prayer is to the fitful sleep of the dead.
Look at them, their bodies curve darkly without intention
and arrow down into the water. What do you call a body
of water made of death and silence? The sea murmurs
on the pages of this book. There are bones buried in the water
under these lines. Do you hear them, do you smell them?
ii
In the panic of drowning, there are hands lifting babies
up in the air, out of the water, for breath. A chorus
of still pictures brought this news to me, to us. Because we do
not see the bodies sinking, because we do not see their mouths
already touching water, the hands lifting up the babies look almost
ordinary. Like the Greeks lifting their newborns unto the sky.
What is the failure of dead? That they sink?
Or that they sink with what is in their hands?
The children of God are upon frightened waters,
And God being hunger, God being the secret grief of salt
moves among his people and does not spare them.
The children of God are upon frightened waters.
iii
There is a child whose protest is of eyes.
She has crossed the water with her mother,
they are shivering, waiting for her father, two days now, they are
waiting,
shivering for a father the mother knows would never arrive.
The mother holds the child, she says to her, gently:
“It’s a brief death. Your father has gone on a brief death.
He’ll soon be back.”
v
A man is bent on his knees, wailing at the waters.
He slaps his hand on the wet sand and rough-cut stones
the way one might fight a brother.
He grabs the shirt of the sand as though they are in a tussle.
The stones here carry the island’s low cry inside them.
A landlocked grief. They say the man was a newlywed.
Now his vows are inside the water.
He claws at the sand. He wails: “Ocean,
you owe me a body. Ocean, give me back my lover.”
vi
Think of the boats. The timber comes from Egypt.
They are cut into diagonals and made pretty. They
are polished by hands. Their saplings are watered by the Nile.
The White Nile flows through Khartoum
before it puts its teeth into the Mediterranean.
The waters and the trees eat bodies.
The children of God are upon frightened waters,
And God being hunger, God being the secret grief of salt
moves among his people and does not spare them.
The children of God are upon frightened waters.
2.
Coma
The silence is a prairie country. The silence
is the silence of hospital sheets.
The silence is of IV tubes, veins, quiet siren of ghosts.
The silence is the silence of what
is dappled invisibly by a body
that is no longer human but not yet a ghost. The silence in your
body has lodged in my throat.
Silence, can you hear me? The silence is of lime,
and kraal stones. The silence is not shadow
but the light of a body buried under a mound of rough stones.
The silence is the silence
of hands. Hands, wire-vine hands, can you hear me?
The silence is the silence of broken ribs.
The silence is the silence of the head,
shorn and shaven. The silence is silence of a bandage wrapped
tight around what is sunken, what is fallen in the gait of the head.
Head,
can you hear me?
The silence is silence of blood,
seething through filament of bandage.
Blood, can you hear me?
Father, blood, Father can you hear me?
I have read this poem multiple times and every time I discover something new about it. Each section is a separate scene, but they are all connected by themes of water, death, and the struggle for connection and survival. The language, images, rhythm, line breaks, and everything is so striking to me, by the end I’m left speechless. What do you see in it? I would love to read your thoughts in the comments below!
“Ophelia”
femininity the existence
or femininity the institution
which do I oppose?
existing in my natural state
is to be subpar.
unladylike.
masculine.
no wonder I would want to be rid of the whole,
but the latter question remains.
I don’t have an answer.
I love my body but intrinsically don’t
as all girls are trained
to love their bodies when men do
and men love what they love.
the bitter taste on my tongue…
but what makes a woman a woman?
and what could make me not?
setting women up for a lifetime of use
and discard.
to place their value on desire
the red of her lip, the curve in her hip
the way the volume of her chest attracts more
that the words of a woman ever could.
and I want to answer there is something more.
an essence of an essence,
quintessential othering
“be true to yourself” mantra
I followed from birth.
I want to say I knew I was different from the other girls
when I was five and liked science
but girls like science.
or when I was fourteen and hated my chest
but truthfully?
for a while I thought it was all I was worth.
and sometimes I fear all my love is narcissistic.
that my love of men is love
of who I wish I was
and my love of women is fetishized envy
love of those who effortlessly embody what I struggle
to perform.
but not entirely.
there are moments in the dead of night
and the break of dawn
when someone is being unequivocally
themselves.
that is what I love the most
the one thing I know
I can never be.
Science tells us
That our bodies desiccate
As we grow older
As we gain knowledge
We die
As we move through
Our invented schooling
Learning our revised history
Practicing our fabricated traditions
Our fingers begin to tremble
Our skin folds into itself
Or sags
Leaks puss
Fractures or
Bruises
Our brain
In our bumped heads
Underneath our dandruffed scalps
Collecting memories
To forget
It terrifies me to think
I can get so close,
finally be in sync,
have a moment of repose…
Only to have you become a stranger again.
So please leave me at the library;
an unchecked book.
I can make myself invisible,
until I’m something you overlook.
It’s been ages since I’ve let someone
fully read through my pages.
An author, or perhaps my own adversary,
for assuming I will always be temporary.
I write myself out of existence;
before there is doubt, there is distance.
Until I’ve swam so far out into the sea,
not even the waves can quite reach me.
My spine is sewn by the emotions
that couldn’t be noted.
Each word is an ocean,
but I’ve never floated.
So I drown myself into my own story,
I grasp for air, but now I feel lonely.
Tongue-stained with insecurities,
I have chapters of excuses just to avoid
a potential hurt I’ve always known.
Until one day, I’m on my own.
