Poem of the Day
The People’s History of 1998
By Gbenga Adesina
The Yangtze River in China lost its nerve / and wanted vengeance.
The Yangtze River in China lost its nerve / and wanted vengeance.
Come, be my camera.
Let’s photograph the ant heap
the queen ant
Two pounds of mestizo cornmeal
half a pound of loin of gachupin
cooked and finely chopped
In the sixty-three years
I have lived
some instants are electric:
The earth locks up the truth about life
even though the blood tells moody lies
when, like the smooth afternoon sea,
Birds of Riverside Park
As thrushes start together all at once.
Abrupt and charming when they sense the dusk
That was long coming now has come, we lie
It wasn’t as deep as I expected,
your grave, next to the grandmother who died
Did we run out of things or just a name for you?
Above us the sun doubles its acclaim for you.
Negative sun or negative shade pulled from the ground …
Their footsteps formed the paisley when Parvati, angry
after a quarrel, ran away from Shiva. He eventually
caught up with her. To commemorate their reunion, he
The trees were soon hushed in the resonance
of darkest emerald as we rushed by
on 322, that route which took us from
“Each ray of sunshine is eight minutes old,”
Serge told me in New York one December
night. “So when one looks at the sky, one sees