Student Work: Poetry
Two Poems
"There is a picture of the three/ Of us, skin showing only/ Around the eyes eyes and in/ Water-streaks on our legs."
Ceviz Agaci (The Walnut Tree)
An adaptation of the poem “Ceviz Ağacı” by Nazım Hikmet, for English speakers.
Fifteen Children
"Against an ambivalent sky,/ Moving quick across the ground,/ A child ran/ Trying to catch the sun."
Turning the Earth by Force
"A woman not formed of the earth in splendor,/ For the earth in its splendor formed only one."
Liminal
"At three am, everything is different. The skyline floats / on the east river while the emperor looms dark and silent. / Nothing means what it did when sleep fills your throat."
The Birth of the Author
"Where the source is, who that creator is, and what His powers are, / hear all these from Me in brief." A cento as creation myth.
Leather
"Sometimes I feel like an ex-pat in my own nation,/ and an outsider among my own people
until I remember/ Grandpa’s hands teaching me to scour banks for mudbugs/ to be eaten at dinner, like he did as a kid."
Tourists in Cuba
"Stumbling in the sweltering dark / the flash from my phone illuminates / a shadow slipping through my shadow"