What they call maniais a mindbrilliant in darkness. In you, Manhattan blinks. No one hears your terrorat the East River,how it beats its head upon the rocks. When you dethroned godyou saw the world too vast, too heavyto hold, and to learn this was to learn wrath.In these white rooms, no one comesto mourn your death, then rebirth.God, awake all night:rest, rest. You are weary,and the world turns without you.
January 9th, 2008
Adeeba Shahid Talukder
Feature Date
- October 31, 2021
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“January 9th, 2008” from NEW MOON: edited by Kazim Ali.
Published by Red Hen Press November 16th, 2021.
Copyright © 2021 by Adeeba Shahid Talukder.
First published on The Best American Poetry Blog.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Adeeba Shahid Talukder is a Pakistani American poet, singer, and translator of Urdu and Persian poetry. She is the author of What Is Not Beautiful (Glass Poetry Press, 2018) and her debut collection, Shahr-e-jaanaan: The City of the Beloved (Tupelo Press, 2020), is a winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Poem-A-Day, Gulf Coast, Meridian, and The Margins, and her translations in PBS Frontline and Words Without Borders. A Best of the Net finalist and a Pushcart nominee, Adeeba holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan and an Emerging Poets fellowship from Poets House.
From the Introduction: “The goal with this anthology is to represent that full range of contemporary expressions of Islam, as well as a full range of genres—poetry, fiction, essay, memoir, political writing, cultural writing, and of course plenty of texts which mix and match and blur all of these modes . . . the trajectories between the pieces—like that of kismet—will be multiple, nonlinear, abstract. The Muslim community is plural and contradictory. This collection of voices ought to be symphony and cacophony at once, like the body of Muslims as they are today.”
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