How does a poem begin?
On a soft day like today, a poem might come from the weather forecast that claims fifteen degrees Celsius but feels like eleven. Clouds in billows across an ever-expansive sky, a tender breeze, buds on trees but we’re all dressed in layers because we know how to read a landscape that is still grey and brown and so we dress in layers, we dress in layers like good converts, like the good cynics that we have become. A poem begins the world. A poem comes from a moment, a phrase misheard, snippets of conversation, a worn-out shop sign, a sigh, a memory, convocation of pigeons rising and landing together, a litany of sins on social media, what was that? What the hell was that? A poem comes from misremembered moments, from glory, from the laugh of a small child that tinkles through the room. It comes from a copse of trees sheltering in their own embrace as we insist on our individual genius and power. A poem turns the copse into a military march, a body of people insistent on stepping forward, materializing the weapon of the politicians who speak against the voice of the people on whom the targets are focused. A poem switches copses into a concentration of desire to life—across the way is a wind sculpted tree, bare on one side, the other like a stiff haircut held by a hairspray to echo the youth from the late eighties singing just another manic Monday on top of their voices. A poem is a beggar at the ceiling of the mouth. A poem is like a permanent mailing address until you can no longer pay for the mailbox and just like that, you keys won’t work anymore.
Otoniya J Okot Bitek writes poetry and fiction. Her first collection, 100 Days, won the 2017 IndieFab Book of the Year Award for poetry, and the 2017 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. Her second collection, A is for Acholi, won the 2023 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her most recent collection of poetry, Song & Dread, is published by Talonbooks. Otoniya’s first novel, We, the Kindling, was recently published by Alchemy, Random House.
