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.

 

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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

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• This site has been made possible in part With support of the North Carolina Arts Council and the partnering arts councils of the Central Piedmont Regional Artists Hub Program.

 

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Copyright (c) 2010. Anjail Rashida Ahmad. All rights reserved.

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