i sat by the lake & ate five tiny oranges & every strand
of flesh & pith was my teacher
i grew warm & soft in the sun & from this ripening
made a poem to search for my teacher
i hear in every syllable its older drum
for this first part of my life
my ancestor was alive my ancestor was kind
& my ancestor was my teacher
i learned music as the bright flesh of the poem
i learned percussion as its pith i learned to listen
to my people speak & harness my many mouths to write
my many mouths to music my people as my teacher
i want badly to write well i want badly
for my teacher to remain or return
to explain again about the drum
draw a circle for me to stand inside
i want more than i dare write i want
more than i understand i want porous borders
to the other world to part & reveal him there
my teacher i want the lake & its secrets
i want enormous things the audacity
for words previously not mine since poured
from my softer places i know enough to believe the miracle
of my faith not resurrection & not water
but the book i want badly to explain
something about music something exact
& pure but what is more polluted than language
language hollowed to an instrument
by my selfish grief you were enormous as a god
& you were kind to me & from that brief overlap
i sit down every time to write hands fragrant
with pith & peel i want to grow larger
than my mourning my ancestor beside me on the long walk
to the poem the long walk
around the lake & now i will begin again
visited in sleep & here by my teacher
Added: Friday, May 22, 2020 / Used with permission. Safia Elhillo performs "In Memory Of Kamau Brathwaite" on May 7, 2020 as part of Split This Rock's 2020 Virtual Poetry Reading Series.
Photo by Aris Theotokatos.
Safia Elhillo is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), which received the 2016 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and a 2018 Arab American Book Award, and Girls That Never Die (One World/Random House, 2021), and a novel in verse forthcoming in 2021 from Make Me A World/Random House.
She holds an MFA from The New School, a Cave Canem Fellowship, and a 2018 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. In addition to appearing widely in journals and anthologies, her work has been translated into several languages and commissioned by Under Armour and the Bavarian State Ballet. With Fatimah Asghar, she is co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019). She was listed in Forbes Africa’s 2018 “30 Under 30” and is a 2019-2021 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
Elhillo was invited as a Featured Poet for Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness (March 26-28, 2020) in Washington, DC which was cancelled as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Split This Rock began a virtual poetry reading series in May 2020 which included a reading by Safia Elhillo & Eve L. Ewing on May 7, 2020.
