Anjail Rashida Ahmad - Award Winning Poet, Educator and Activist

 

 

shadowboxing

 

under the power of the shower jet,

the mirrored past swam back from my thirteenth year

reminding of that old terror sightlessness,

of someday going blind.

the fear it provoked—

 

real as a certain truth.

so poor the vision at fifteen,

preamble to blindness--

couldn’t share this with anyone

‘cause to say it, was to make it so.

 

i learned to choke-down feelings-- my own voice,

to be absorbed in to the blindness

by accretion, a kind of death

since the eyes deliver the world

directly through their brilliant light.

 

but the eyes, like the rest of the body

are only a witness, mirrors

to what the soul undergoes in a life time;

only a witness

to distortions the mind can make

 

sorting through the overwhelm

of what can seem a senseless world. the fear

is not one of going blind because i couldn’t see

but more from life-conditions in america,

from a life pressed down everyday,

 

the struggle to remain human

and the need to unsee the salt wounds

                                with my mother.

knee-deep in the suck and drag

of unshucked emotion, threatening to undermine

 

our kin, this would not blind so much

as make me act, instead, as though i were;

as if non-seeing itself could pass for sight.

so, here i am, reconciling

how i did it: the unseeing,

 

the muffled responses, toward rewriting the veiled past

so as to gain my voice

and thus love my vision back to me.

for i am not blind,

               i see, i see, i see.

 

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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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