"The Tree of Knowledge" by Shane McCrae

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend April 21, 2018   The Tree of Knowledge   Shane McCrae

The hastily assembled angel saw One thing was like another thing and that Thing like another everything     depend- ed on     how high it was     the place you saw   Things from     and he had seen the Earth from where A human couldn't see the Earth     and could- n't tell most human things apart    and though He hadn't ever really understood   His job he knew it had to do with seeing And what he saw     was everything would come Together at the same time everything Would fall apart     and that was humans thinking   The world was meant for them and other things Were accidental     or were decora- tions meant for them and therefore purposeful That humans thought that God had told them so   And what the hastily assembled angel Thought     was that probably God had said the same thing To every living thing     on Earth and on- ly stopped when one said Really back     but then   Again     the hastily assembled angel Couldn't tell human things apart     and maybe That Really mattered what     would he have heard Holy     or maybe Folly     or maybe Kill me                Copyright © 2018 Shane McCrae. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "'The Tree of Knowledge' is part of a tiny sequence of poems featuring a being I call 'the hastily assembled angel.' A lot of the poems I've been writing lately seem to me to be very belated responses to the Martian poetry that briefly appeared in the United Kingdom about forty years ago, and so feature protagonists to whom Earth seems even more strange than it seems to people who live on Earth in a more everyday way. If our country is going to be led by a comic-book villain, our poems might as well be filled with Martians." —Shane McCrae   Shane McCrae is the author, most recently, of The Gilded Auction Block forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux and In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City. Poetry by McCrae   In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017) "The Alien" by Greg Delanty "Lighthead's Guide to the Galaxy" by Terrance Hayes "Severance Songs, 2.1" by Joshua Corey April Guest Editor: Tracy K. Smith   Thanks to Tracy K. Smith, current United States poet laureate and author of Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018), who curated Poem-a-Day this month. Read more about Smith and our guest editors for the year. Help Support Poem-a-Day   If you value Poem-a-Day, please consider a monthly donation or one-time gift to help make it possible. Poem-a-Day is the only digital series publishing new, previously unpublished work by today's poets each weekday morning. The free series, which also features a curated selection of classic poems on weekends, reaches 450,000+ readers daily. Thank you! 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