"Things You’ve Never Seen" by Fady Joudah

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend May 3, 2018   Things You've Never Seen   Fady Joudah

When I tell it, the first time I saw hail, I say it was in a desert and knocked a man unconscious then drove a woman into my arms because she thought the end was near but I assured her this wasn't the case. When he tells it, he smiles, says the first winter after their exodus was the coldest. Rare snow came down, and his mother, who knew what the fluff was but until then had never seen it, woke him and said, Look outside, what do you see? She called his name twice. It was dark. Snow fell a paragraph to sum up decades of heat. He had no answer. She said, this is flour from heaven. When he tells it, he's an old man returning to his mother.                Copyright © 2018 Fady Joudah. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "In the midst of some drama or another that reared its head in the American poetry world and seemed consuming, I was listening to my father speak. When is the poem more than the sum of our progressive imperial selves, I wondered?" —Fady Joudah   Fady Joudah's most recent poetry collection is Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance (Milkweed Editions, 2018). He works as an ER physician and lives in Houston, Texas.   Photo credit: Cybele Knowles Poetry by Joudah   Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance (Milkweed Editions, 2018) "The Year's Awakening" by Thomas Hardy "In General" by Pattiann Rogers "Heaven for Helen" by Mark Doty May Guest Editor: Matthew Shenoda   Thanks to Matthew Shenoda, author of Tahrir Suite: Poems (TriQuarterly Books, 2014), who curated Poem-a-Day this month. Read more about Shenoda 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 Poem-a-Day is the only digital series publishing new, previously unpublished work by today's poets each weekday morning.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