Elegy by Aracelis Girmay

Elegy
by Aracelis Girmay

What to do with this knowledge
     that our living is not guaranteed?

Perhaps one day you touch the young branch
of something beautiful. & it grows & grows
despite your birthdays & the death certificate,
& it one day shades the heads of something beautiful
or makes itself useful to the nest. Walk out
of your house, then, believing in this.
Nothing else matters.

All above us is the touching
of strangers & parrots,
some of them human,
some of them not human.

Listen to me. I am telling you
a true thing. This is the only kingdom.
The kingdom of touching;
the touches of the disappearing, things.

---

This appeared on the impeccably curated Poetry Unbound, Pádraig Ó Tuama's podcast. Aracelis Girmay is Eritrean American, born in 1977, currently teaches at Hampshire College, and Kingdom Animalia was her second book (after Teeth, 2007). The book won the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Elegy sits within a body of work deeply concerned with diaspora, family, the body, kinship across mortality, and the moral imagination of Black and African diasporic life.

The sense of touch, the in-the-momentness of it - this gives me a queer sort of ache to read, the way you read something and it says something true that resonates in the bones, even if it may not make obvious sense to the cognitive mind. This goes along with the Samuel Hazo, “give me whatever is that will not be again”, the sense of what it means to be fully alive and awake and embodied to the touch of all things, animate and inanimate, knowing that that is all of what we actually have, the only thing through which we can make sense of our brief and beautiful living.