Vox Populi
A curated webspace for Poetry, Politics, and Nature with over 20,000 daily subscribers and over 8,000 archived posts.
Lisa Suhair Majaj: Living in History
It’s true, what we do or don’t do may come to haunt us.
Outside a man walks by: blue shirt, bald head. He blends
into the dusk, like the olive trees outside my window,
the blue-gray sky washed clean by recent rain,
the bird whose twittering heralds the evening.
May we all fit together like this: trees, birds, sky,
people, separate elements in a living portrait,
outlines smoothed by the forgiving wash
of lingering light. Whatever the skins we live in,
the names we choose, the gods we claim or disavow,
may we be like grains of sand on the beach at night:
a hundred million separate particles
creating a single expanse on which to lie back
and study the stars. And may we remember the generosity
of light: how it travels through unimaginable darkness,
age after age, to light our small human night.
Copyright 2009 Lisa Suhair Majaj. From Geographies of Light (Del Sol Press, 2009). Included in Vox Populi by permission of the author.
Lisa Suhair Majaj is a Palestinian-American writer living in Cyprus. Her poetry, creative nonfiction and critical essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies across the U.S., Europe and the Middle East.
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“And may we remember the generosity
of light: how it travels through unimaginable darkness,
age after age, to light our small human night.”
Yes🙏✨
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Yes
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“may we be like grains of sand on the beach at night:
a hundred million separate particles
creating a single expanse on which to lie back
and study the stars.”
Amen to that — amen.
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Yes, I love Lisa’s lyrical vision.
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What a moving, heartfelt poem. Living in History really touched my heart.
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The poem makes me aware of the immensity of the universe which we face armed only with love.
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