elegy for a soldier

Elegy for a Soldier
June Jordan, 1936-2002
by Marilyn Hacker
I.
The city where I knew you was swift.
A lover cabbed to Brooklyn
(broke, but so what) after the night shift
in a Second Avenue
diner. The lover was a Quaker,
a poet, an anti-war
activist. Was blonde, was twenty-four.
Wet snow fell on the access
road to the Manhattan Bridge. I was
neither lover, slept uptown.
But [...]

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Reason, Purpose

Danticat’s narrative was viewed by me as a clever paralleling of disembodied story lines. The author begins by slowly uncoiling what promises to be a familial drama, told closely amongst characters that will progress evenly into the past and future. I expect, then, to fall into a similar motivation that I [...]

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a poet speaks death: mahmoud darwish’s Memory

                                          all my movements
                                          are prayers
                                          i’ve got to write
                                          before the ink & blood
                                          run out
                                          i’ve got to say one more thing
                                          before i die
it’s the distance he takes that’s jarring. that the narrator only speaks from “I” a few times in actual dialogue throughout the book.
he is speaking death. the concrete in between [...]

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