Party Poem
This poem I wrote in late 2001 keeps knocking on my brain, especially the line: "There is mute difficulty in having a light heart, in writing a poem..." Can't believe it's still saved on my computer... A little context: I wrote it the week after 9/11, for a poetry class I was in. It was the fall semester of my Senior year at NYU, and Elaine Equi was my teacher then. She had us write one poem every week with a certain theme. The theme for that week was going to be “parties” and she said we could stick to that or write about what had just happened. I guess I decided to write about both. I’m not sure how I decided that or what was happening then, but I do know what’s happening now. Last night, Lee and I had dinner with his parents at an ancient inn in a tiny town in Western Massachusetts. The people who served us wore masks, and we wore ours until we started to eat the amazing food they served us. We talked about the recent elections, and the strangeness of aging, and we sat under this candelabra.
Party Poem
Confetti vaguely traced the bus’s windshield, skipped bashful along the wind trails across the East River. Misplaced confetti on a Tuesday morning commute as a million white leaves. Memos, faxes, files and leaves. A party invited the world and rocked it in an explosion of sounds and light. It left a million leaves aimless floating and finally falling, steeping in acrid hangover.
This city, a party is life amplified.
A million deaths, like the crisp brown leaves I drag my feet through lately for the satisfaction of sound, are life extinguished, autumn somehow premature and torrid. There is mute difficulty in skipping over streets that ghost a steaming rot, in having a light heart, in writing a poem.
I was born alongside a civil war, artificially nudged to birth to beat the bombs to the hospital. They called it darb, literally, hitting. Confusion hit blood and beauty out of Lebanon through my formative years. To be beat slowly in a country where terror has whispered softly into citizens’ ears for too long, from behind, and also in scattered ways it would expand and scream face forward.
Grey men leaking cigarette smoke, semi-automatic weapons shoulder-slung, brought our car to sporadic halts to peer in oddly and wave us on to heaping watermelon plates and endless cups of Turkish coffee. Nights we were nudged into the house’s womb, safe from darb. We played cards while the edges of the outside world fell away in crumbs. Inside only candlelight, warm and wavering across the queen of diamonds, and adults whispering urgency as background.
The schism between then and now reverberates.
Amplified beats planted feet and pulled them up from the floor in the brimming room where all I could do when I was that drunk was dance and smile and invite the heat that comes from having my body so near someone else’s. On the way home beneath some stars and the new blue, white, and red banners, I disturbed the sleeping leaves.
Amira Pierce
Fall 2001