Poem Full of Worry Ending with My Birth
I worry that my friends will misunderstand my silence as a lack of love, or interest, instead of a tent city built for my own mind, I worry I can no longer pretend enough to get through another year of pretending I know that I understand time, though I can see my own hands; sometimes, I worry over how to dress in a world where a white woman wearing a scarf over her head is assumed to be cold, whereas with my head cloaked, I am an immediate symbol of a war folks have been fighting eons-deep before I was born, a meteor.
Copyright © 2018 by Tarfia Faizullah. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 10, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I suspect that worrying is a large and ongoing part of the human experience, but I also try to pretend like I don't do it. I suppose this is a poem in which I admit that I do; it turns out that what I worry over the most is being misunderstood. I'm also considering proximity, between our physical bodies and the symbols others decide they are, between history and our inheritance of it; I'm trying to complicate and expand how we are seen versus how we see ourselves. I like the idea of a speaker who picks her own symbols, in this case, a meteor: a body from outer space that becomes more and more incandescent, until her arrival into the earth's atmosphere is announced by a streak of light.”
—Tarfia Faizullah
Tarfia Faizullah
Tarfia Faizullah was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Bangladeshi parents and raised in Texas.
Faizullah is the author of two poetry collections, Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf Press, 2018) and Seam (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014). Her work was anthologized in The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 3: Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019), edited by Fatimah Asghar and Safia Elhillo.