Poems of Persistence, Solidarity, and Refuge – Purvi Shah

We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond.  ― Gwendolyn Brooks  

As we journey through political, economic, and global health crises, we turn to poetry to share truths that unearth underlying causes, illuminate impacts, and insist on transformative change. For many of us, today’s challenges are not new. The struggle of isolation, economic insecurity, inadequate medical care, deadly institutionalized negligence, governmental decisions that put Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian, disabled, sick, and other structurally precarious people at greater risk are not new. Today, many more people are experiencing the vulnerability of these unrelenting issues. We recognize this opportunity for a heightened awareness of how our very survival depends on one another.

Poetry can help keep the flame of resilience, solidarity, and resistance alive in us. It can help us process and move through grief, anger, loneliness. Poetry can be a comfort when the most necessary actions are to rest and recover. It can remind us of what’s at stake, that our lives and legacy are worth the fight. As cultural workers, we know that culture shapes our political and social imagination at a foundational level. As poets, we can use poetry to map what is, what has been, and possibly, the way forward, including the reasons not to return to what does not honor and protect our lives, our communities, and our planet. 

We asked poets to give us the words they chant to get out of bed, to raise their fists, to encourage their kin, to remind us, as this crisis does, that “we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.” To read all of these poems, visit Split This Rock’s website.

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Saraswati nods to the white man who, after hearing her liberation poems, embroiders “dowry”
By Purvi Shah

Even now, goddesses

                                                                       outlast colonialism.

Split This Rock · Purvi Shah Saraswati nods 2020 Virtual Open Mic Audio

Listen as Purvi Shah reads "Saraswati nods to the white man who, after hearing her liberation poems, embroiders "dowry"."

The Quarry's Top 10 Most-Viewed Poems of 2017

In 2017, readers turned most often to ten poems that affirm our humanity, mourn our wounds and loss, and that speak to us of reunion and joyful rebellion.

We are delighted to present the ten most-viewed poems published in Split This Rock’s social justice poetry database, The Quarry, in 2017. They represent this country’s greatest strength – the variety of our residents' backgrounds and the clarifying views they offer on living this human and troubled American life. In 2017 the all-time most read poems changed to the top two poems of 2017. Previously the All Time Number 1 Poem was Ross Gay’s “A Small Needful Fact,”and still holds at Number 3 since The Quarry went online. You may read previous collections of most-viewed poems on Blog This Rock.

Many of these top ten poems also happen to connect to Split This Rock’s history and directly to our work in 2017. Amanda Gorman, the first US Youth Poet Laureate, offered her inaugural poem for Poem of the Week. Melissa Tuckey is a co-founder of the organization, and the poems by Keno Evol, Purvi Shah, and Keith Wilson all placed in the Sonia Sanchez-Langston Hughes Poetry Contest in 2017.  Richard Blanco featured at Richard Blanco featured at Split This Rock’s fifth anniversary celebration, and Aracelis Girmay featured at the poetry festival in 2016. Both of their poems were part of a special portfolio edition of Poem of the Week published on inauguration day 2017.

Kazim Ali will feature at this year’s Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness in Washington, DC from April 19 through April 21, along with Elizabeth Acevedo, Kazim Ali, Ellen Bass, Sherwin Bitsui, Kwame Dawes, Camille Dungy, Ilya Kaminsky, Sharon Olds, Sonia Sanchez, Solmaz Sharif, Terisa Siagatonu, Paul Tran, Javier Zamora! We do hope you can join us. Early bird rates are available until February 23! Visit Split This Rock's website for details.

2017’s most-viewed poems run the gamut from mourning to celebration. These poems mourn our distance from the future world we deserve. These poems provoke us to embrace and behold each other. These poems witness the way to a future we know is possible. That future is a social world organized with our dignity at its center. That future ennobles us, lets us live in cooperation with nature, in our varied and glorious bodies, sustained by the many shapes and textures of our love. That future lets us share stories and languages and practices, lets us share all of them knowing they will be honored for the sacred inheritance they are.

In these ten poems, and all the poems of The Quarry, we can hear intimations of the future we mean to live, we can hear her warm breath singing full-throated and ready.

  

1   Declaration of Interdependence, by Richard Blanco

2   YOU ARE WHO I LOVE, by Aracelis Girmay

3   Do You Speak Persian, by Kaveh Akbar

4   Politics of an Elegy, by Hieu Mihn Nguyen

5   In This Place (An American Lyric), by Amanda Gorman

6   Shooting for the Sky, by Purvi Shah

7   Requiem, Melissa Tuckey

8   Peach, by Kazim Ali

9   Black Matters, by Keith Wilson

10 On Meeting a Brother for the First Time, by Keno Evol

We invite readers to find these poem in The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database, along with their 475-plus kin, to find in these poems the sense of belonging that fuels the long work of resistance and imagination. The poems are searchable by social justice theme and indexed to encourage discovery.

We hear of the poems being used by teachers in classrooms, for writing workshops, in vigils, performances, worship services, and more! The poems are traveling the country and the world with their witness and their provocation. Everywhere these poems are read, they insist that the beloved community Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of is not a lost idea and that our path to a just and thriving world begins with seeing each other clearly, with generous vision.

In Split This Rock’s tenth anniversary year, we are firming up plans to expand The Quarry’s reach even further, so it continues to function not only as a repository of excellent poetry, but as an active tool for those who seek to make justice present in our time. We’re always open to innovative ideas from Splitistas– for organizing, teaching, worship, reflection. Email your story of using The Quarry to info@splitthisrock.org.

M. F. Simone Roberts
Managing Editor of The Quarry
Split This Rock Poetry & Social Justice Fellow

Poem of the Week: Purvi Shah

      

   

Loss is an art, traversing one world to the next

"One wonders if Gwen Stefani of the band No Doubt

and The Artist Formerly Known as Prince know the meaning

behind their freshly minted body hennas...While hennas may  

be all the rage, the meaning beyond the tradition goes much

deeper. The ancient Indian art of body painting called Mehndi

(actually Persian in origin), initially reserved for bridal ceremonies

and spiritual occasions, has become the hot new way to adorn

oneself without committing to a permanent tattoo or wearing jewelry."   

-Aura Project ad

The mehndi is leaving my hands,

brown swirls dissolving into brown skin.

Somewhere you are traveling

through new architecture, celebrating

a companionate life in new cities.

  

If blind, you could see through your hands,

a universe etched in your palms. Your ankles

are rust, vines of buds and leaves. I envision

him leaning to the hotel tub, washing

the grime of the city from your feet, soap  

separated from the stencil. Love's imprint

lasts long when the fingers

rejoice, when the body's art is treasure.

  

Sap travels beyond root, cones

can be rolled here or there, a technology.

Here West Village women henna

their breasts before marriage, etching

coarse veins onto skins, parlors

painting commerce from the sacred.

  

Riding the train in America, the thrush emerges

from water pools, orange chaff unconnected to the earth

growing, as if, without umbilical soils.

Do the roots dissolve through inebriation

like my henna lines growing wild flowers

at the tub? The mark of family is on the body

not the engagement ring suddenly removed at the sink

not in the route the scent of perfume takes to leave the day's sweat

but in the designs which intimate bequeathed blood.

  

When the liquid paint

hits skin, it is a cold

separation, the memory of hundreds

of daughters walking towards a foreign

house, parents looking askance, blurred.  

  

They say: absence is a color, the deep

brown of life which is always receding.

-Purvi Shah 

Photo credit: Willi Wong     

 

Used by permission.    

From Terrain Tracks (New Rivers Press, 2006)   

Purvi Shah's Terrain Tracks (New Rivers Press, 2006), which explores migration as potential and loss, won the Many Voices Project prize and was nominated for the Asian American Writers' Workshop Members' Choice Award. Her work fighting violence against women earned her the inaugural SONY South Asian Social Services Award in 2008. In 2011, she served as Artistic Director for Together We Are New York, a community-based poetry project to highlight the voices of Asian Americans during the 10th anniversary of 9/11. She believes in the miracle of poetry and the beauty of change.  

Check out more of her work at http://purvipoets.net  or @PurviPoets on Twitter.   

 

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.    

Split This Rock
www.splitthisrock.org
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210