the black maria
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About this ebook
Aracelis Girmay
Aracelis Girmay is the author of three collections of poetry: the black maria (BOA Editions, 2016); Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, 2011), winner of the 2011 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award and the GLCA New Writers Award, and a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; and Teeth (Curbstone Press, 2007). The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, Civitella Ranieri, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Girmay is the winner of a 2015 Whiting Award for Poetry. She teaches in Hampshire College’s School for Interdisciplinary Arts and Drew University’s low-residency MFA program in poetry.
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Reviews for the black maria
10 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Graceful…. Englightening….ProfoundThese are the words that came to mind when I finished this dazzling poetry collection whose poems which at times were intimately personal and other times outraged at injustices in the world.I was immersed in this collection as these poems whispered in my ear, touched my heart, and soothed my spirit.Words like these had me reflecting on the deeper meaning of the written thoughts:“if there were angels, they would be flieswho hover over our privacies,kissing us with their mouthsthat have kissed other wounds.”
Book preview
the black maria - Aracelis Girmay
prayer & letter to the dead
The typewriter hammers out
the end of its ribbon,
as you, one by one,
go & go & go,
outlasted,
by memory,
by ink,
the patience
of the paper
where the dark words buck
like fish in air.
I, The Living.
Which is
my portrait?
The right hand
bleeding the page
for its marrowmarks
or the silence my left hand
inherits?
-
While the room is still
dry here,
while the page is still
white, still here,
more shore than sea, more still
than alive, while the air is now
touching the dark & funny fruit of
your eyebrows where it is quiet enough
for me to hear the small sighing
of your shoes lift up into
the old & broken boat,
while the small hands of water
wave, each one waving
its blue handkerchief, then
the gentle flutter of luck
& tears. We all know
what happens next. Do not go.
But if you must,
risking what you will, then,
in a language that is my first
but not your first, & with what I know
& do not know, I will try to build
a shore for you here, a landing place, here
where the paper dreams
that you will last. Our parents
& our grandparents taught
us: in the school of dreaming,
the discipline of dreaming.
It is my work: to revise & revise,
even as you are filling my eyes, now,
& you are filling the sea (Courages).
& the fishermen drop their veils
into your grave.
-
The sea delivers
your letters, the reams of paper,
the ink & messages
& shells telling us goodbye.
Goodbye, you say,
to them, to that, goodbye,
to the city in which for lunch, for dinner,
we ate the moon, its theater of faces,
its sweater factory, the cathedral
bells ringing stoically above a fit of sparrows,
the cafés whose doorways seem to weep, now,
with the red & amber weeping of beaded curtains through which
the months blow in & out, invisibly
as months, as old men.
Goodbye your somewhere where
the President stands in uniform
wearing a peacock, pinned-alive,
to his chest. Through
his binoculars he sees this & that, approving, disapproving.
He does not understand the degrees of love.
The difference between your love for