The Woodlice by Aracelis Girmay

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend September 28, 2015   The Woodlice   Aracelis Girmay

The beauty of one sister who loved them so she smuggled the woodlice into her pockets & then into the house, after a day’s work of digging in the yard, & after the older ones of us had fed her & washed, she carried them into the bed with her, to mother them, so that they would have two blankets & be warm, for this is what she knew of love, & the beloveds emerged one by one from their defenses, unfolding themselves across the bed’s white sheet like they did over 400 years ago, carried from that other moonlight, accidentally, or by children, into the ship’s dark hold, slowly adapting to the new rooms of cloths, then fields, & we, the elders to that sister, we, having seen strangers in our house before, we, being older, being more ugly & afraid, we began, then, to teach her the lessons of dirt & fear.            Copyright © 2015 by Aracelis Girmay. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “In many ways this poem is an ode to the smallest sister and her relationship to the land—in this case, the woodlice/rolly pollies in a plot of dirt behind our mother’s house. It’s an ode to the child’s act of caring for something she thought needed her attention. But the poem also laments the older siblings’ loss of tenderness and attention to the earth. The undercurrent here is swirling with a story about the ecological consequences of human migrations and what gets taken with us (with or without our meaning to take things with us), which is also, in the end, a story about history and ‘America.’ This poem wants to look at, think about, and mend a historically inflicted tear between the siblings and the land.” —Aracelis Girmay   Aracelis Girmay is the author of Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, 2011). She teaches at Hampshire College and in Drew University’s low-residency MFA program and lives in Brooklyn, New York.   Photo credit: Sheila Griffin Poetry by Girmay   Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, 2011) "Toy Cloud" by Nathan Hoks "My Childhood" by Matthew Zapruder "Blur" by Andrew Hudgins Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038