Interval by Marilyn Hacker

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend June 2, 2016   Interval   Marilyn Hacker

Attention fraying in late afternoon light, soon day will be done, not   the work incumbent on it —whatever that might have been—   Gnarls of an old text in the other alphabet: can I unknot them,   reweave mirror fabric of liminal unravelings?   *   Liminal space where exiles with dictionaries lose themselves: barzakh,   Arabic isthmus, the span from death to resurrection   in Farsi: limbo, where Socrates murmurs to unbaptized babies   in contrapuntal cognates,   they hear fardous, paradise..            Copyright © 2016 Marilyn Hacker. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “A Palestinian poet friend and I were discussing via email the meaning of the word barzakh in Arabic. We both thought it also sounded Persian. My Arabic dictionary gave me one sense, but the cosmopolitan and often wrongheaded Google translator did indeed suggest I also look under ‘Farsi,’ which gave a related but different meaning. Then a second friend, a Kurdish poet, added: the space between death and resurrection. Unraveling language is a redemptive liminal space.” —Marilyn Hacker   Marilyn Hacker is the author of A Stranger’s Mirror: New and Selected Poems 1994-2014 (W. W. Norton, 2015). She also translated Emmanuel Moses’s Preludes and Fugues (Oberlin College Press, 2016) from the French. She lives in Paris.   Photo credit: Brian Palmer  Poetry by Hacker   A Stranger’s Mirror: New and Selected Poems 1994-2014 (W. W. Norton & Company, 2015) "Mess Hall" by Solmaz Sharif "Twenty-One Love Poems [Poem II]" by Adrienne Rich "Sci-Fi" by Tracy K. Smith Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends.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