Poem of the Day
1981
By Asiya Wadud
in a world the orange sun resets
in a world the orange sun resets
it was great to be a little sick with fear but
it’s better to be alive with a driver’s license
And now the objects return. Chief interests
of their divine secular lives no longer
idle. Thought anticipates them, but they aren’t
Experience teaches, but its lessons
may be useless. I could have done without
a few whose only by-product is grief,
Reclaimed from brushwood,
from coarse rank grass interspersed
with stagnant bog water,
It rises from the North Atlantic’s stacks
as radio silence, a generalized lack
of discursive tone or narrative movement distinguished
Sad storm of objects becoming things,
the objective correlative, tired of me
as I am of it. I embody everything it hates
This is the house the South built.
This is the mouse that gnawed at the house
The South built. This is the cat
Within 電 a field poetics:
sky, rain, lightning over la milpa—
components in the symbol
I shall have Beauty underground.
Poppæa was once in my tumbrel, you see.
So were blithe Helen and white Iope
XXXIV
We are falling through the abyss Voices, of terror,
come to me I try to answer but sense