Sherendipity Saturday: The Power of Poetry (Inaugural Address)

Tim Walker

Note: A huge thanks to M. for discovering this amazing Asian-American poet at the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco.


I kill this, the silence.
There are miracles that happen, she said,
and everything is made visible.
We speak of suicides and intimacies,
of longings lush like wet furrows,
of oceans bearing us toward imagined riches,
of burning humiliations and crimes by the government
of self hate and love that breaks through silences.

We are lightning and justice
Our souls become transparent like glass
revealing tears for war-dead sons
                     [...]

We must recognize ourselves at last.
We are a rainforest of color and noise.
We hear everything
We are unafraid.

Our language is beautiful.
- Janice Mirikitani, "Love Works"