THE YEAR OF DYING: SHAMEEM BLACK Next Poem:....................................................................................................................................... Back to Poetry Index

I

The dying speak in seed pearl consonants, ruby vowels.

Their sentences ring wedding bracelets round our wrists.

It was a good year for dying. Water swept them out to sea,

The only death Greek sailors claimed to fear. Mountains

Cracked as if the earth had swallowed glass. On the secured

Eighth floor of the neurosurgery ward, minds vanished.

Waking at dawn, pouring honey into sea, breathing upon the fallen

Eyelash of a child, she catches the bodies of the dead,

The luminous core of purple tulips. As she speaks the first

Words of morning, her tongue clicks rubies in the mouth,

Where salt pearls nestle in shells of speech.

II

A crushed peach

In the boneyard

moves no farther

Than it’s thrown

Cherries in brass bowls,

a wooden door smashed,

a knocking in the absence of the door.

Lucid tongue,

sharp with desert melon

spicy grape

fruit I cannot name

speak again

with peach against white teeth.

III

I imagine you imagine me

making tea

leaves never tasted

with fruit from your market

in cups from the country next door

choral tea

IV

Arch of a woman walking

through a curved century

She steps from stone painting

Alight with river clay

Charred skin at her heel

Sweet lime on her tongue

Robed in newsprint,

or maybe castoff poems

from fragile Silk Road Paths

She lifts her foot in oval dance.

Dr. Shameem Black is an assistant professor at the English Department of Yale University, where she specializes in questions of globalization in contemporary literature. Currently she is writing about reconciliation in an era of mass violence.

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