June 12

 Tyler Barton moderated poems on June 12 at Writers and Books in view of the Flower City Poetry Festival

Mimesis by Fady Joudah

 

My daughter

wouldn’t hurt a spider

That had nested

Between her bicycle handles

For two weeks

She waited

Until it left of its own accord

If you tear down the web I said

It will simply know

This isn’t a place to call home

And you’d get to go biking

She said that’s how others

Become refugees isn’t it?

 

from Alight. Copyright © 2013

 

Postcards from Everywhere and Nowhere

 

Dear Cousin,

I just landed.

At the airport, a picture

of a ship

crowning a wave.

A figure

on the prow waits,

like you on the tarmac

looking somewhere

ahead.

I waved and you did

not wave back.

Maybe you couldn't

see me.

 

**

Dear Cousin,

1 chant, I'm home,

every day.

How many times

will it take

to feel it?

The monarchs

are starting

to cocoon.

Do you know

if, when they

transform,

they forget their past?

 

**

Dear Cousin,

Papers are  important

in this land.

 

My neighbor told

me about Chinese

paper sons who invented

new identities

so they could stay.

 

I think of the paper

dolls we played with,

how we unfolded each tab of the wedding

dress and turned it into confetti.

 

**

Dear Cousin,

What happens when

your genetic

code is grafted

in two languages?

Does it mean

the patterns

never stop

shifting?

Yesterday we had

an earthquake

in San Diego

and I heard

the earth grinding

its teeth,

as if to speak.

 

**

Dear Cousin,

 

My son asked

if citizen is 

a foreign

word.

 

I was tempted to say yes.

 

I told him

there was once a city

whose people 

were not alien.

 

They belonged.

 

Oh, so where do we

belong?  He asked

 

Reckless Sonnet No. 8 by Kimiko Hahn

My father, as a boy in Milwaukee, thought

the cicada's cry was the whir from a live wire--

not from muscles on the sides of an insect

vibrating against an outer membrane. Strange though

that, because they have no ears, no one knows why

the males cry so doggedly into the gray air.

Not strange that the young live underground sucking sap from tree roots

for seventeen years. A long, charmed childhood

not unlike one in a Great Lake town where at dusk

you'd pack up swimsuit, shake sand off your towel

and head back to the lights in the two-family houses

lining the streets. Where the family sat around the radio.

And the parents argued over their son and daughter

until each left for good. To cry in the air.

 

-- from The Artist’s Daughter, (W.W Norton & Company, 2002

 

Proof ~ Cornelius Eady  Listen to Cornelius recite it: at minute 3:00 on the this hyperlink Poem

 

Zohran Mamdani Inaugural Poem, New York, January 1, 2026

 

You have to imagine it.

Who said you were too dark,

too large, too queer, too loud.

Who said you were too poor,

Too strange, too fat.

You have to imagine it.

Who said you must keep quiet.

Who heard your story,

then rolled their eyes.

Who tried to change your name to invisible.

You’ve got to imagine.

Who heard your name and refused to pronounce it.

Who checked their watch and said not now.

James Baldwin wrote, “The place in which I’ll fit

will not exist until I make it.”

New York, city of invention,

roiling town,

refresher and renewer.

New York, city of the real,

will the canyons whisper in a hundred tongues.

New York, where your lucky self

waits for your arrival,

where there is always soil for your root.

This is our time,

the taste of us, the spice of us,

the hollers and the rhythms

and the beats of us.

In the echo of our ancestors

who made certain we know who we are.

 

City of insistence,

city of resistance.

You have to imagine

an army that wins without firing a bullet,

a joy that wears down the rock of no.

Up from insults,

up from blocked doors,

up from trick bags,

up from fear,

up from shame,

up from the way it was done before.

You have to imagine

that space they said wasn’t yours,

that time they said you’d never own,

the invisible city lit,

on its way.

This moment is our proof.

 

Nutshell of discussion of this poem at O Pen, Pittsford Library, Jan. 14, 2026 -- Kitty Jospé

Proof:  Curiously, I had heard at first, the title as Truth, knowing the context of this poem delivered by Rochester native, Cornelius Eady on the occasion of Zohran Mamdani's Inauguration as mayor of NYC.

note: third stanza, 10th line: the first word is not will but where. 

One person felt it was a beautiful love poem to this city, the starting point of so many who have immigrated to this country.  The lines are humble, yet powerful, with the repeated "you have to imagine"

shifting to an almost imperative "you've got to imagine".  What reassurance wrapped in the repeated "who said" as he rolls out dismissive talk that tries to invisibilize  those who are not part of the powerful and privileged.  The inclusion of the James Baldwin quote, with visceral touches of details describing those who have risen up from slavery, "the taste of us, the spice of us, the hollers and rhythms of us" lead to the repeated "up from" -- to a new hope infused with joy "that wears down the rock of no."  

There is a sense of the city lit by itself, an insistence hammering out the celebration many felt with the election of Obama, that yes, the election of a Black Man to an important public office is absolute proof that all "can make it". 

 It's inspiring for all of us to imagine all the "lucky selves waiting for our arrival, with soil for our roots".