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Anjail Rashida Ahmad - Award Winning Poet, Educator and Activist
remapping
…Marin County, California, 2007
across san francisco bay,
the sky blooms a reliable blue;
a wisp of clouds dusts its edges.
beneath the golden gate,
scrub brush, lichen and spruce pine amble
hillsides, crowding her shoulders.
if she were cropped in a photograph,
anyone could see this.
right now though, no one sees her
feeling-out the rough-ridge of road back up the trail,
ragged cane scattering uncertainty.
its bright, red-eye sweeping before her
as she passes along the road edge
one foot fall at a time.
carefully she strides,
a confident toe turned outward,
heels pressed firmly along places newly etched
like Braille marks on a page.
this page, she turns again
with an agile insistence
since to hesitate,
is to be lost.
so much depends on the fiber of memory:
its ability to give back a remembered world,
its sorted details tentatively stacked
each day until gnawed like a fixture in the brain.
…eyes darting, widening
for any ambient light,
for any something she might now see: sunlight,
sliver of movement no matter how faint,
belly of road churned on the mind’s ground-glass.
this day, on rough-grained shoulder,
she taps her way to the wooden corridor
rising, inset with the hill,
pivots left, onto awkward sidewalk,
lain patchwork that even the sighted, fleet of foot dread
its edges, jutting and uneven, threaten
to tilt her, to bring her down,
but she has learned:
step quick, step lively, stay aloft.
Contact Information:
Anjail Rashida Ahmad, PhD
Director and Associate Professor,
The Creative Writing Program at A&T
North Carolina A&T State University
Greensboro, NC 27411
Tel: 336.334.7771, ext. 2370
E-mail: arahmad@anjailahmad.com; arahmad@ncat.edu
Copyright (c) 2010. Anjail Rashida Ahmad. All rights reserved.
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