A Legacy
All this noisy commotion isolated a fairly small universe of nothing special. I had faced the assistant to the incumbent, his failed face of poetry bottomless with self-pride and a satisfaction that fed his wolf. And he was a wolf and when I scoffed at him with some penetration I could see the clamor of his wounds but also the vanity in his recognitions. He believed I was undeserving and thought it his right to judge, and his judgment, a stun gun, took my gender and race and euthanized its center, and he thought this was an extension of the occult, that it was the intuition of a bright star affecting forward. I wanted him to see this in a particular light but the particular worsened into a bruise of matter far more inhumane, and I fell into its hole and he, with his glee, had no idea, because his gender and race gave him the privilege to look down and see how my skeleton warped my will but not the firmament of my broadness, and what I know now as measuring across power and enduring many luminary deficits that come out of symptoms and their fallen edges.
Copyright © 2014 by Prageeta Sharma. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-a-Day on March 13, 2014. Browse the Poem-a-Day archive.
“‘A Legacy’ was written as a reflection about the social intersections between a number of things as they relate to (institutional and non-institutional) poetry: gender, race, generational shifts, power and teaching out of (and also without) an ethos. I wanted to ask: what we do with our ‘identity politics’ when we suffer them as embodied along with their consequences? When are they not symbolic? Or when can the poem be unable to hold their symbolism? Also, I dislike hierarchies about poetry: I don’t like it when people are ‘wolves’ and judge who gets to participate and who doesn’t. I wrote the poem to examine a certain kind of hungry, ambitious artist, poet-judge, an ‘assistant to the incumbent,’ who perceives the ‘poetry-gate’ but fails to recognize human beings outside of poems.”
—Prageeta Sharma