Diversity Roll Call ~ poetry

Your assignment is to post a poem in a form unique to a particular country, an example would be the sijo (Korea), haiku (Japan) or American Sentence (this is a single line of 17 syllables like a haiku. Created by Ginsberg). Another option: post a favorite poem by a poet of color. Tell us a little about the poet and the poem. Last option, post a poem that celebrates a particular country or culture. Tell us why you enjoy this poem. Please cite the collections for your entries. Let us know if you own the collection containing your feature.

I’m cheating a bit, b/c the truth is, I don’t read much poetry.  My favorite poem is probably June Jordan’s “Poem About My Rights.“  It’s long, but so deep, layered, and profound–it never fails to amaze and move my students (and me!).  If you watch Pratibha Parmar’s film, A Place of Rage, you can see Jordan reading it, which is also an amazing experience.  Jordan’s really talking about borders, I think, so she starts local but moves outward to address the violation of borders globally (imperialism) and the challenge for women to find safe space anywhere in the world.  I’m posting one of my own poems, b/c I recently returned from Canada and this poem sums up how I feel whenever I go back there to visit my mother.  I wrote this poem in 2005, a couple of months after I finished writing my memoir, and about a year after my father died of cancer; I was sitting at the computer in my childhood home, and felt irritated by the raucous sounds of children playing outdoors…then I remembered who and where I was, stopped fussing, and wrote this instead.  It concludes my self-published memoir, Stranger in the Family.

Our Spring

it used to be our laughter
that rang out from the courtyard

it was our hill—
barely a slope, really—
that we endlessly descended
perched on narrow skateboards
chins pressed to our knees
the hem of our pink Easter dresses
mashed between the wheels

it was our youth
our daring
our joyous shout aimed at the sun
still lingering in the spring sky
since time was flung ahead

we knew then more hope than trepidation
we saw only promise in days to come
we were gorgeous in our innocence
thoroughly seduced by the new season
that now belongs to other laughing children
making sport in the sun

(4/5/05)