"Sleep" by Rita Banerjee

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend November 30, 2017   Sleep   Rita Banerjee

What does it mean to be so still? to glide along the ocean floor   like some black-tongued electric eel, to burn through marbled gold and green   of oceanic things like some compact mass deforming space, time,   a void within voids, and then? It is easier to imagine amphibian,   to know that blood, too, can change its temperament as quickly as   salamanders change skin, as quickly as eyes of newt and tongues of dog become   incantations, enchantments of art and life just as an animal submerged   under water becomes unknown, just as respirations become primitive   and breaths and motions cease as a lone fish in a dark pond   arrives as an object of thought and becomes stone.            Copyright © 2017 Rita Banerjee. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "'Sleep' explores the space where human agency or communication seems impossible until an unexpected moment of connection or surprise occurs, often between two people, often through art. A few years ago, I had the honor of traveling through Jinshan, Taiwan. At a monastery, I attended a conference on Buddhism. Outside the temple grounds, English held no cachet. Jinshan was famous for its hot springs and pools of captive koi. I watched them move through the water without a sound and began writing this poem. One day, I got lost in a local marketplace. To ask for directions home, I tried speaking in Japanese. A woman selling herbs and flowers answered. She had been forced to learn Japanese as a schoolgirl —Rita Banerjee   Rita Banerjee is the author of Echo in Four Beats, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in February 2018. She is the executive creative director of the Cambridge Writers' Workshop and teaches on modernism, art house film, and South Asian aesthetics and literary theory at the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich in Germany, where she currently lives.   Photo credit: Nadja Teinze Poetry by Banerjee   Echo in Four Beats (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming February 2018) "Wolf Cento" by Simone Muench "The White Horse" by D. H. Lawrence "The Life So Short..." by Eamon Grennan 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 Poem-a-Day is the only digital series publishing new, previously unpublished work by today's poets each weekday morning.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