Each Wednesday, Editor's Choice brings you a poem from a new book selected as a must-read. Our feature editor this week is Heather Green.
Ahmed Bouanani
In Abyssinia in Ethiopia I can't remember . . .
Who sailed night after night,
dreaming of miniature savages, without ever
reaching the last night where the sun
rose from the foot of the bed?
Nothing but luminous battles
in the house with the shutters!
Nothing but mute meetings, nothing but dead people!
Only warriors in metal
bathed in gold and blood
crying under their masks
for childhoods greased with arrows and the Quran!
Childhood, my childhood with its stench of seaweed and trenches!
Childhood, my childhood where
sorcerers' recipes
were handed down
between two death throes!
My childhood
with its maw of bloody religion, my childhood
with its maw of a mother with an injured liver
urinating on morning crepes!
Childhood, my childhood
on a badly traced Congo river . . .
Upon waking one had to jump like a goat
on the back of a grandmother, one had to . . .
How can you still roam
between uninhabited tales and lands
with your hands in your pockets?
Or populate with ancient warriors
the slums of Ben M'sik and the Carrières Centrales?
Or else spread out naked
penis in a timid cloud
on the edge of a torrent sweeping along our friends' cadavers?
READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM
Share Share
Tweet Tweet
Forward Forward
Head shot of Reginald Dwayne Betts
Dan Chiasson on Reginald Dwayne Betts's Poetry After Prison
 
"Poets tell various kinds of down-and-out stories about being rescued by their vocations, but Betts’s is among the most amazing I have heard....While he was in solitary confinement, someone slid a copy of The Black Poets, an anthology edited by Dudley Randall, under Betts’s door. He read it and began writing poems."

via THE NEW YORKER
READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES
Cover of Natalie Harkin's Archival-Poetics

"In using the state’s archive against itself, in forcing the state to remember its many forms of violence against indigenous people, in releasing ancestral voices from their archival confines, Harkin counters oppression with 'infinite ways to imagine/ infinite possibilities to/ transform/ beyond this colonial-archive-box.' Her inventive and necessary interventions into Aboriginal Affairs records offer back to the state its own language not as a narcissistic exercise in nation-building but rather as an indictment of its alleged successes."
READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE
Poetry Daily logo
Poetry Daily Depends on You

We make reading the best contemporary poetry a treasured daily experience. Consider a contribution today.
You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com. 
If you would like to unsubscribe please click here.

© 2019 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030

Design by the Binding Agency