.".. the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns."
~ Adam Zagajewski, "Try to Praise the Mutilated World"
It's said poets aren't very good
with numbers or with anything
that equates to what's considered
real in this world. And yet, in poems,
how long have we been counting days,
months, body bags; children in cages,
missing parents, boats capsized
in the foam under a canopy of
uncountable stars.? We can't stop
trying to count even as animals
become extinct, even as we can't
save plants from wildfire and
the tidal heat. But more
than count them, we name
them: as if naming itself is practice
for mourning. We count the dead;
we name our dead. We the living
bring flowers and candles to the places
where they were gunned down, taken,
or never returned. We the living
remind ourselves to go on living
by enfolding ourselves in their
stories; by wrapping the silk
cord of each day's beginning
and end around our wrists,
around theirs.
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (website) is Co-Winner of the 2019 Crab Orchard Open Competition in Poetry for Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Southern Illinois University Press, September 2020). She was appointed Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia for 2020-22, and in 2021 received 1 of 23 Poet Laureate Fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Mellon Foundation. She is the winner of the 2015 Resurgence Prize (UK), the world’s first major award for ecopoetry, selected by former UK poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, Alice Oswald, and Jo Shapcott. She is the author of What is Left of Wings, I Ask (2018 Center for the Book Arts Letterpress Chapbook Prize, selected by former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey); Bright as Mirrors Left in the Grass (Kudzu House Press eChapbook selection for Spring 2015), Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (Utah State University Press, 2014 May Swenson Prize), Night Willow (Phoenicia Publishing, 2014), The Saints of Streets (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2013), Juan Luna’s Revolver (2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize, University of Notre Dame Press), and nine other books. She is a member of the core faculty of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University which she directed from 2009-2015; she also teaches classes at The Muse Writers’ Center in Norfolk. In 2018, she was the inaugural Glasgow Distinguished Writer in Residence at Washington and Lee University. When she isn’t writing, reading, or teaching, she cooks with her family, knits, hand-binds books, and listens to tango music.