So many of us are not from here. So many of us are from, in fact, many places, including here. This week’s poem gives voice to that condition.
Samaa Abdurraqib spent most of her life in the Midwest among, she writes, “first buckeyes and then badgers.” She lives in Portland and travels all across the state for work and for pleasure.
The Fly-Over
By Samaa Abdurraqib
If you were to ask me where I’m from
I wouldn’t tell it straight.
I’d piece together a story
of ellipses, dashes, and bent arrows.
I have never known how to be of a place.
I flew over the Midwest last week.
Land that raised me.
Bright with the lights of Friday night.
Racism ornamental, like lawn jockeys.
Land of wide open earnestness.
I peered from an altitude, wondering
whose river lies there?
whose sprawling, level acreage?
whose water tower? whose subdivision?
My heart – a still muscle behind ribs.
But soon,
A comforting familiarity blossoms.
First in my belly,
Spreading outward to my limbs.
In an instant, I am smitten.
Expanse of my former homeland.
Flatness –
Like the unfolding of a map.
Flatness –
Like the phonetic of the middle “a”.
Squares of variegated green
spreading out from the center
like a meditation.
This is where my feet took root.
I belong to this land.
In a week’s time, I am traveling east,
back to the land where I live.
It is night. I am craning my neck
in search of the tides that map my breath.
The lights cease at a curve,
and we are propelled into an expanse of darkness.
My shoulders settle,
And I am home.
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is poet who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2018 Samaa Abdurraqib. It appears here by permission of the author. For an archive of all the poems that have appeared in this column, go to www.pressherald.com/tag/deep-water.
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