Poem of the Day
1981
By Asiya Wadud
in a world the orange sun resets
in a world the orange sun resets
Here Follows an Account of the Nature of Fish.
Here follows a description of an unknown town.
If I look to the opposite shore and greet myself there,
if I call out to myself come here
and watch myself laboriously construct from shore-things
Clouds scuffle and clinch in this March sky;
wind presses our turned collars to chin
and Chris casts his line against the grain.
Jerome discovered fifteen signs of doom
each of a day; seas will explode in steam,
man's towers burst into ash, the earth will move,
Perhaps by the time I have written this
the last three or four will also be gone:
not many people will mark a few less
While sitting prostrate before the ivory feet of the great Buddha, I spilled almost an entire can of Diet Coke on the floor. I quickly tried to mop up the mess with my long hair.
The solitary animal walks alone. She has no uterus. She has no bone.
She slithers around dark bars and libraries. She carves
a beautiful girl on the cave wall. She dances with Aurora Borealis,
Nobody understood her cruelty to herself. In this life, cruelty
begets cruelty, and, before long, one would have to chop off
one's own hand to end the source of self-torture. Yet, we
Your country’s memory is short. But know this:
We live, have been living, with this threat
staining the earth we still call home
We shall see the deer as part of the trunks of the forest.
We shall see its antlers imitating the branches of the trees.