"The Body Remembers" by Yusef Komunyakaa

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend April 1, 2019   The Body Remembers   Yusef Komunyakaa

I stood on one foot for three minutes & didn't tilt the scales. Do you remember how quickly we scrambled up an oak leaning out over the creek, how easy to trust the water to break our glorious leaps? The body remembers every wish one lives for or doesn't, or even horror. Our dance was a rally in sunny leaves, then quick as anything, Johnny Dickson was up opening his arms wide in the tallest oak, waving to the sky, & in the flick of an eye he was a buffalo fish gigged, pleading for help, voiceless. Bigger & stronger, he knew every turn in the creek past his back door, but now he was cooing like a brown dove in a trap of twigs. A water-honed spear of kindling jutted up, as if it were the point of our folly & humbug on a Sunday afternoon, right? Five of us carried him home through the thicket, our feet cutting a new path, running in sleep years later. We were young as condom-balloons flowering crabapple trees in double bloom & had a world of baleful hope & breath. Does Johnny run fingers over the thick welt on his belly, days we were still invincible? Sometimes I spend half a day feeling for bones in my body, humming a half-forgotten ballad on a park bench a long ways from home. The body remembers the berry bushes heavy with sweetness shivering in a lonely woods, but I doubt it knows words live longer than clay & spit of flesh, as rock-bottom love. Is it easier to remember pleasure or does hurt ease truest hunger? That summer, rocking back & forth, uprooting what's to come, the shadow of the tree weighed as much as a man.            Copyright © 2019 by Yusef Komunyakaa. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 1, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets. About This Poem   "'The Body Remembers' sprung out of my memory of swimming in a creek in Bogalusa, Louisiana, in the 1950s when the entire culture was still segregated—especially in any joyful display of the body. However, we boys often took risks and, coming back to that past stitched with youthful energy, perhaps our bravado was fueled by a public dare. Such a moment of play is full of celebration, especially during the months of July and August. But also, there is a reality to our naïve recklessness—and there, in the danger of such moments, we learned to come together as brothers." —Yusef Komunyakaa   Yusef Komunyakaa was born on April 29, 1947, in Bogalusa, Louisiana. He is the author of several books, including The Emperor of Water Clocks (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016) and Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems 1977-1989 (Wesleyan University Press, 1993), winner of the 1994 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. He is currently the Distinguished Senior Poet in New York University's graduate creative writing program and lives in New York City. Photo Credit: Tom Wallace Poetry by Komunyakaa   The Emperor of Water Clocks (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016) "The Children of Beslan (To My Children)" by Irakli Kakabadze "We All Return to the Place Where We Were Born" by Oscar Gonzales "What I Mean When I Say Farmhouse" by Geffrey Davis April Guest Editor: Tracy K. Smith   Thanks to Tracy K. Smith, poet laureate of the United States and author of Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2019), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month's weekdays. Read a Q&A with Smith about her curatorial approach this month and find out more about our guest editors for the year. 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