A Golden Shovel for Yesterday
Amman, Jordan
2025, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
Silver hums yet the tap has surrendered to red. The only water left beads across my
face where sun burns skin. It abandons my throat to the dust. Don’t mind
these turns of phrase. Let me salvage from loss an echo. Once, someone sang
of a world buried in blue; I am only trying to unearth it. Hand me a shovel, a way out
of this drought. I am desert-blooded, and yes, my people knew thirst, but oh,
they crossed oceans and their memories are not mine. How to find an oasis when all
I know is porcelain? I collect pieces to string whole. There are only so many ways that
someone can say I’m sorry before the water is ripped from her throat in a loose
sob. The sea of my childhood is filled with skeletons: once upon a time, there was blue.
And fields of lavender. So many ways to cover stone. I’m stuck at the (b)rink
of a shudder without end or beginning. Every light comes back to itself—what of
it? Now, there is only the flame of corroding metal and the gray of bone. The sky
is smothered by the dust of churning waves. Every place I have gone tells me where
I will go. I fill my pockets with coral, memories I have already forgotten. Does
this story make sense? Does the sea? Here, when the wind starts to splinter, it
promises no rain. I let it sweep over me, enter the space around each rib and go
to wounds I forgot were there. Can you miss an expanse you never knew? I want to
reclaim belonging or the reflection of it, song-swept rosemary beneath the torrent and
the date palms before fruit. The longing fields of ash. What happened here? Why?
Reflection
This poem is a golden shovel, a poetic form invented by Terrance Hayes in which the last word of every line in the new poem, read in order, forms a line/lines from an existing poem. In my poem, I chose to incorporate the following lines from Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Real Prayers Are Not the Words, but the Attention that Comes First”: “my mind sang out oh / all that loose, blue rink of sky where does / it go to, and why?” Structuring my poem in such a way allowed me to explore the inward reflection and outward connection to nature that Oliver’s lines emphasize. “[T]hat loose, blue rink of sky” called to me, allowing me to take its more questioning, expansive feeling and adapt it to the urgent—at points claustrophobic—space of my own poem. I live in one of the most water-scarce countries in the world, and I have seen first-hand what destructive environmental policies can lead to. My experiences have taught me that when we harm the environment, we inevitably harm ourselves. I wanted my poem to explore the negative effects of environmental destruction—the empty tap, the bleached coral, the burnt fields—that I have personally experienced in addition to the psychological impact that they've had on me and those around me. As a result, the poem focuses heavily on the narrator’s sense of unmooring and loss, which become more pronounced as the poem develops. As our skies become less blue, I hope my poem holds both the memory of what once was and the reality of where we now are. Unearthing "a world buried in blue" and "that loose blue rink of sky" requires seeking what we came from and the path that led us here.