Yusef Komunyakaa, “Nighttime Begins with a Line by Pablo Neruda”

So my body went on growing, by night,
went on pleading & singing to the earth
I was born to be woven back into Love,
let me see if I can’t sink my roots
deeper into you, your minerals & water,
your leaf rot & gold, your telling & un-
telling of the oldest tales inscribed
on wind-carved rocks, silt & grass,
your songs & prayers, your oaths & myths,
your nights & days in one unending lament,
your luminous swarm of wet kisses
& stings, your spleen & mind,
yur outrageous forgetting & remembrance,
your ghosts & rebirths, your thunderstones
& mushrooms, & your kind loss of memory.

The Chameleon Couch is the thirteenth book of poems by Yusef Komunyakaa. It also includes “Blue Dementia” (at the Academy of American Poets website), “Orpheus at the Second Gate of Hades” (from The New Yorker), and “Kindness” and “Memory of the Murdered Professors at the Jagiellonian” (both from Poetry).

8 April 2011 | poetry |