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Earth Wants Us Here

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"Everything worthwhile is done with other people."
-Mariame Kaba

Samandar Ghaus is a Pakistani-American poet, gardener, and community organizer currently working on an MFA at Indiana University. They are a VONA/Voices of Our Nation fellow, a Tin House workshop alum, and the recipient of the 2020 Vera Meyer Strube Poetry Prize. Their work can be found on poets.org, Poetry Daily, and poiesis, and they currently serve as Poetry Editor for Indiana Review.

Welcome to the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey. Saami, what poems have you brought for us today?

EARTH WANTS US HERE

after Gabriela Kolčavá’s “Picking Mushrooms”

 

I almost didn’t see them, heads bowed

under the sparse birch crowns — isn’t this

what science calls biomimicry? Standing still

or walking slow in a forest, more velvet-headed

deer than human, on the lookout for a good

mushroom or two. Let’s call it, earth’s survival

strategy, and remember that people are trees,

too — which means this is also the people’s survival

strategy, to be a lovely long-legged animal or a river

birch or even a tall dead ash or a succulent

hunk of chicken-of-the-woods clinging

to a tree like a sign of something, like an

orange flag declaring life is possible and the world

is a delicious place! How I want to believe

this on my most blinding days, when a bottle

of pills looms closer than the freezer chanterelles,

(buttered, sauteed, salted from last August)

in my imagination of how the day might

end. You can see it in the photograph,

the whirlwind surrounding our people

and trees, our peopletrees (where I come from,

there is even a tree called peepal) — the leaf-

laden earth and the lichen-loved branches

swirling out of focus like my own desire to

be alive, which, wait for it, in the photograph

has the odd effect of sharpening the dark

eyes of the birch bark, calling to attention

how the trees are looking at us, and maybe

looking out for us, which is what I want

to say about people, too, that these two

friends in/of the forest would doff their thick

jackets for a sick wolf or lay a warm hand

on the forehead of a stranger, maybe my own —

sometimes to learn of the earth is to love it,

to look closely at its fevered face and feel the blossom-

soft tug of gravity saying, come here, or even, please

stay, and hear the mushrooms running their pale feet

into tributaries under the dark, soft ground,

and I want to stay looking through the worm-

hole of this hurricane eye in the photograph

so I might hear the chorus singing through today’s

dense rain, chaga and chestnut and heather and

moss, peepal and people and skein of puffball

mushrooms on an old sassafras log, clapping

their hands and harmonizing like the fox I saw

perfectly red and black under a canopy of sugar

maples last week, convincing me there is no

better way to tree than people, that there is no

better way to people than tree, to stare deep

into the unending sorrow at my oaken feet

and understand there are morels growing

there in the dark.

 

 

RAMADAN DASTARKHAN

for Queer Muslims of Boston & the Union Square Halaqa

 

Faint smell of feet & bedsheet on the floor. A steady

rise & fall of seats & the bell of laughter

too. A gathering of voices joking about jinns

& a hand slicing bean pie fresh from Detroit, my brother

I just met in a turban; his lover with eyebrows of two colors.

Pit bull melting in the middle of this living

room, whom we scoot to the side to pray maghrib,

all mixed up, gender to gender, as someone sings

the Fatihah. We who have never known the straight

path, make du’a for our siblings on the knife,

then pass around forks to eat the sweets

we made. We have no name

for this: our day-long hunger

blessed & the peals of laughter

flooding the dastarkhan.

We decide our children

will name it history

and unbothered

we eat

& eat

 

You've been listening to the poetry of Samandar Ghaus on the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey.

Morel mushroom

(KY4186, Wikimedia)

"Everything worthwhile is done with other people."
-Mariame Kaba

Samandar Ghaus is a Pakistani-American poet, gardener, and community organizer currently working on an MFA at Indiana University. They are a VONA/Voices of Our Nation fellow, a Tin House workshop alum, and the recipient of the 2020 Vera Meyer Strube Poetry Prize. Their work can be found on poets.org, Poetry Daily, and poiesis, and they currently serve as Poetry Editor for Indiana Review.

On this edition of the Poets Weave, they read their poems "EARTH WANTS US HERE" and "RAMADAN DASTARKHAN."

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