Sometimes I Believe I’m a Moroccan Poet Exiled on Mars
But I'm from the middle of another country.My cells are snow crystals with faults perpetuallybreaking fusing to others.I see red violet in an opal sky.In autumn the pies are pumpkin cherry.But for nine years I've written poemsnear seawater on beaches wherecamels graze longing not to see seas.But I want to see them.Nor storms swirling pages to ash.So much red moving clockwise counter.Where are the clocks? Time as pastoral.The budding bursting the flightof seeds the spheres of haywound on land purged.But all I see is dust my hand in dust.I'm writing in dust.What I'm writing will become dust.I'm the premonitionof dust exiled here.
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- February 4, 2024
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“Sometimes I Believe I’m a Moroccan Poet Exiled on Mars” from AURORA AMERICANA: by Myronn Hardy.
Published by Princeton University Press on October 10, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Myronn Hardy.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Princeton, New Jersey
Princeton University
"A clear-eyed vantage of America. . . . [Aurora Americana] is in itself the record of a complicated parting triggered by being an expatriate, and the necessity of returning home."
—Rebecca Morgan Frank, Poetry Foundation
“Myronn Hardy’s tough, analytical, associative mind moves with astonishing inventiveness between America and Algeria, and between persona and his own speaking voice, as in the splendid title poem. His idiom is as spare as it is singular, but never obtuse or unmoored from ordinary human concerns. Quietly visionary, Aurora Americana is among the best books of poems I’ve read in a long time.”
—Tom Sleigh
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