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Solstice in Truro

Teaching term done, I keep my laptop shut
A chill in the air runs under weak June sun
Chickadee warbler catbird waxwing—
Morning migrant songs drowned by bulldozer next door
The backing up beeping a constant one note feed
From far off, boundless tides crest onto restless sand
How my grandfather made his way, a refugee from Kyiv
How the new war gathers and opens his voice in me

Born in 1963, poet Joshua Weiner is the author of three poetry collections, including The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish (University Of Chicago Press, 2013).

Themes

About this Poem

“‘Solstice in Truro’ is one of those poems that just slips out and finds its final form very quickly, in an attempt to respond to my immediate world of sensation. One line led to another, pretty much in the order in which they appear. The emergence of my grandfather in the final lines, and the war in Ukraine, too, was a discovery I wasn’t looking for. I had been reading a lot of Sung and Tang Dynasty poems, classical poems, over the previous few years, mostly in Red Pine’s translations. I think you can hear the influences of line and image in what I wrote.”
—Joshua Weiner

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More by this poet

Hikmet: Çankiri Prison, 1938

Today is Sunday.
Today, for the first time, they let me go out into the sun.
And I stood there I didn't move,
struck for the first time, the very first time ever:
how far away from me the sky is
how blue it is
how wide.
I sat down, in respect, in awe, I sat down on the ground,
I leaned my back against the wall.
In this moment, there were no waves to fall into;
in this moment, there was no liberty, and no wife, my wife.
There was only the earth beneath me, the sun above me, and me.

Joshua Weiner

2016

In the Event

If you are sitting in an exit row please identify yourself to a crew member to allow for reseating if you lack the ability to read, speak, or understand the language, or the graphic form, or the ability to understand oral crew commands in the language specified.

You maybe understand this but will you understand how to comply with these instructions, the instructions of our crew, who are fully authorized, and all the illuminated signs posted throughout the cabin? Please locate them now.

Joshua Weiner

2014

Art Pepper

Scared boy, he even fled a cloud
reminding him of what might happen

when his father returned from sea,
wasted, to find him perhaps again

locked out in the cold, waiting
for other drinkers to come home

(his mother, her lover)--the catalysis
of routine violence passing close

like a storm cloud insisting rain;
until the rain did fall

and the father left, returning though
once with a clarinet . . .

Joshua Weiner

2001

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Solstice in Truro

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