Poem of the Day
1981
By Asiya Wadud
in a world the orange sun resets
in a world the orange sun resets
Nowhere to go back to—they say—but there is somewhere to go.
That you made love
on an office desk
on the seventeenth floor
Stretch our hearts ample as a yawn,
so we might accommodate the double-
wide trailer of our neighbors’ grief
Had the king of Uruk never wrestled Enkidu,
the wild man of the steppe, and just barely defeated him
on points, he never would have fallen in love with him
A melody played on the piano with five black keys. I heard it, walking across
packed snow and ice with microspikes under my shoes.
Today we’re going to get to work on the details
At night, he ordered his own sun, which was
Supposedly arriving soon, they said
he saw my mother in the scar-city—
brown hair and yellow dusted-down dress
with lips too cracked to hold down a language
a ghost is hanging
from the doorpost
of our past—
So obsessed am I with feeling
That I sometimes lose my way when I step free
From all the sensations I receive.