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Thursday, March 13, 2014

Poem-A-Day: A Legacy by Prageeta Sharma

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March 13, 2014

A Legacy

by Prageeta Sharma

  

 

All this noisy commotion isolated a fairly 

small universe of nothing special. 

I had faced the assistant to the incumbent, 

his failed face of poetry bottomless 

with self-pride and a satisfaction that fed his wolf. 

And he was a wolf 

and when I scoffed at him 

with some penetration I could see the clamor 

of his wounds but also the vanity 

in his recognitions. He believed I was undeserving 

and thought it his right to judge, and his 

judgment, a stun gun, took 

my gender and race and euthanized 

its center, and he thought this 

was an extension of the occult, 

that it was the intuition 

of a bright star 

affecting forward. 

I wanted him to see this in a particular 

light but the particular worsened into 

a bruise of matter far more inhumane, 

and I fell into its hole and he, with his glee, 

had no idea, because his gender and race 

gave him the privilege to look down 

and see how my skeleton warped my will 

but not the firmament of my broadness, 

and what I know now as measuring across 

power and enduring many luminary deficits 

that come out of symptoms and their fallen edges.

 

  

Copyright © 2014 by Prageeta Sharma. Used with permission of the author.

About This Poem 

"'A Legacy' was written as a reflection about the social intersections between a number of things as they relate to (institutional and non-institutional) poetry: gender, race, generational shifts, power and teaching out of (and also without) an ethos. I wanted to ask: what we do with our 'identity politics' when we suffer them as embodied along with their consequences? When are they not symbolic? Or when can the poem be unable to hold their symbolism? Also, I dislike hierarchies about poetry: I don't like it when people are 'wolves' and judge who gets to participate and who doesn't. I wrote the poem to examine a certain kind of hungry, ambitious artist, poet-judge, an 'assistant to the incumbent,' who perceives the 'poetry-gate' but fails to recognize human beings outside of poems."

--Prageeta Sharma 

Most Recent Book by Sharma





Undergloom

(Fence Books, 2013) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem-A-Day
Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-A-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Browse the Poem-A-Day Archive.  
 

Prageeta Sharma's most recent book is Undergloom (Fence Books, 2013). She teaches creative writing at the University of Montana.  


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