Anti-Elegy
My swimmer’s body a slash at the door,
I listen to you thrash against the shore of sleep
I think we owe this to each other, to never dream
Alone again, to come home when asked. You would
Say I want for you the world, its favors. But the world
Is ending, its favors few. I want for us a future
No longer wrecked against the animal love made of us
I want to say I bore witness to the world
And mean I did not flinch when it felled you
I tried. I didn’t, not really. I held my hand out
Shielding only my face from the sun.
The most American disease is the dis-
ease of self-obsession. In its ruins I find
there are questions I never quite learned to ask:
How can I help?
What did you need?
How will I know?
Copyright © 2026 by Sadia Hassan. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 9, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I wrote this poem years ago for my mother as a way to mend the distance between us. I am very thankful to this poem. It helped me ask more honest questions, of myself and the world, as an act of love.”
—Sadia Hassan
Sadia Hassan
Sadia Hassan earned her MFA from the University of Mississippi. She is a Somali poet and author of the chapbook Enumeration (Akashic Press, 2020) appears in the New-Generation African Poets Saba: A Chapbook Box Set (Akashic Books, 2020).
Hassan was a 2023 Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellow and the recipient of the 2020 Hurston/Wright College Award for Poetry. She lives in the Midwest.