Miriam Sagan
Untitled
a great city
I can’t identify
towers to the sun
sprawling
shantytown
where a language
I can’t speak
is spoken
and a woman
carries
a heavy load on her head,
these dead
in particular
meant something
to you, or me,
I can’t weep
equally
it appears
some things
seem more apparently
my relatives
although
the necklace
of teeth
makes me nervous
as well it might,
and did you really think
your enemy
the one
you’ll kill
has no family
the draped woman
finds your bared flesh
confusing
but every veil
can turn
to water
in the eye of God.
Miriam Sagan is the author of 30 books, including the novel Black Rainbow (Sherman Asher, 2015) and Geographic: A Memoir of Time and Space (Casa de Snapdragon). winner of the 2016 Arizona/New Mexico Book Award in Poetry. She founded and headed the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College until her retirement in 2017. Her blog, Miriam’s Well, has a thousand daily readers. She has been a writer in residence in two national parks, at Yaddo, MacDowell, Colorado Art Ranch, Andrew’s Experimental Forest, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Iceland’s Gullkistan Residency for creative people, and another dozen or so remote and unique places. Her awards include the Santa Fe Mayor’s award for Excellence in the Arts, the Poetry Gratitude Award from New Mexico Literary Arts, and A Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa.
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