‘Heritage’
— Joyce Chong
it’s a myth
that love lives in the heart it lives in the throat we push it out
when we speak when we gasp we take a little for ourselves
It’s not often that a poem is published with the background and research and grieving process involved is included with it. ‘Heritage’ is a poem that stems from cruel truths, the reality of the unjustness that happens regularly in the world, and the way those events and places can become attached to us. The human body’s capacity for grief once or twice removed, the ability for events to have farther-reaching impacts than anticipated. The cutting potential of injustice.
may God beat
us awake scourge our brains to life may we measure every victory
by the momentary absence of pain
Akbar discusses the role that time had in the creation of this poem. Anger and sadness in its immediacy and the adjusted influence that time can have on a poem, the difference between inhabiting a poem and borrowing someone else’s words. Akbar crafts painfully beautiful verses as vessels for grief, creating a mirror that reflects and amplifies Reyhaneh’s story, her strength and certainty of mind in the face of something terrifying and unfair.
the body is a mosque borrowed from Heaven centuries of time
stain the glazed brick our skin rubs away like a chip
in the middle of an hourglass