On Meeting Robert Hayden in a Dream
here among them the dead the others the aliens
I see you without coke bottle glasses a wavy comb over
your nose buried inside a notebook over-
flowing with strange sightings men and women
without a homeland a library to shelve histories
dreams the names of rare flowers fruits baby names
exiled from their villages learning to say hello
with accents thick with nostalgia for their purple planets
here UFO sightings aren’t so spectacular
border crossing is quintessentially american universal
crowds gather in squalid ghettoes where every country is a city
every city is a verse & every verse echoes “Those Winter
Sundays”
where a New World opens up where all the martians are
welcome
at the writing table with their fountain pens & swollen digits &
you whispering
what took so long?
Copyright © 2015 by Abdul Ali. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 29, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.
“‘On Meeting Robert Hayden in a Dream’ is an homage to Robert Hayden, a giant of American and African American letters. When I first read his collection American Journal, I was immediately struck by his interest in ‘the other.’ I do not need to tell you how relevant his work is today. Are we not ‘aliens’ to each other? Are we not holding signs claiming that our lives matter? I believe now more than ever, Hayden’s work needs to be discussed as a pillar of American literature in the way that we talk about Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.”
—Abdul Ali
Abdul Ali
Abdul Ali is the author of Trouble Sleeping (New Issues Press, 2015). He teaches at Towson University and lives in Baltimore, Maryland.