My Grief, the Sun

Sanna Wani

• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781487010850
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Poetesse

Winner, 2023 Trillium Book Award for Poetry

Finalist, Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
The highly anticipated debut collection from acclaimed poet Sanna Wani.

In Sanna Wani's poems, each verse is ode and elegy. The body is the page, time is a friend, and every voice, a soul. Sharply political and frequently magical, these often-intimate poems reach for everything from Hayao Miyazaki's 1997 film Princess Mononoke to German Orientalist scholarship on early Islam. From concrete to confessional, exegesis to erasure, the Missinnihe river in Canada to the Zabarwan mountains in Kashmir, My Grief, the Sun undoes genre, listens carefully to the planet's breathing, addresses an endless and ineffable you, and promises enough joy and sorrow to keep growing.

Copyright © 2022 Sanna Wani

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Published in Canada in 2022 and the USA in 2022 by House of Anansi Press Inc.
www.houseofanansi.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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House of Anansi Press is a Global Certified Accessible™ (GCA by Benetech) publisher. The ebook version of this book meets stringent accessibility standards and is available to students and readers with print disabilities.

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26 25 24 23 22 1 2 3 4 5

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: My grief, the sun : poems / Sanna Wani.
Names: Wani, Sanna, author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2021037554X |
Canadiana (ebook) 20210379456 | ISBN 9781487010843 (softcover) |
ISBN 9781487010850 (EPUB)
Classification: LCC PS8645.A55 M9 2022 | DDC C811/.6—dc23

Cover design: Alysia Shewchuk
Text design: Laura Brady
Typesetting: Laura Brady and Marijke Friesen

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House of Anansi Press respectfully acknowledges that the land on which we operate is the Traditional Territory of many Nations, including the Anishinabeg, the Wendat, and the Haudenosaunee. It is also the Treaty Lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit.

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We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.

for you

I.

Dorsal, after Mitski

I write simply so that my friends love me very much
and that those who love me very much love me more.

—Gabriel García Márquez

Masha’Allah

after Danusha Laméris

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I am eager for any mouth to open

that soft word, “what God wills.”

Masha’Allah your hands are so gentle.

The baby is so happy, masha’Allah.

Masha’Allah we all have enough to eat.

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So much joy I’ve carried has soured

easily as plums under nobody’s eyes.

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Every language must have this seal.

A word to protect our breath

from the world’s unruly hands,

luck’s staggering gait.

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Our children have grown up to be so kind, masha’Allah.

Masha’Allah the birds are singing in the fields again.

Masha’Allah the rice is alive in the grove.

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How lightly we learn to hold each blessing,

as if it were the wind, trembling at an unlocked door.

And still we wait for it, ceaselessly, the way a child would,

patience pouring into each word, from one mouth to the next.

Today and Every Day, Without You

I don’t care

about the flowers, which I merely invented

to give myself another reason to address you.
— Aleksandar Ristović

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is long and sharp tastes

like milk and salt a teacup where

you sat like so many trees is now

dry we drink like tired fossils

from the rock of our want from the dregs

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of green and pink flowers hungry

for the sun like the roses in the garden

or the dream I had where you became

the sky where I met you in the un-

hurried blue of an afternoon daisy

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who stands to greet me the sun

the breeze sliding down the letter h

until I am home waiting for your call

my mother watching the water sit still in

the garden light bouncing continually

through our hands the marble of the door

bright bronze and broken o hungry flowers

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I am trying to show you how quiet the slope

of my desire sits on the hillside endless

buried there you are in every beautiful thing

wearing the light again I am watching

the trees again the sky is calling

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for quiet the morning like everyone’s eyes the door

shut tight only the daisies unfurling watching as I leave

Memory is Sleeping

Sometimes remembering refuses us. Sometimes I’m
a shoreline the water of memory drags its palm across.
— Billy-Ray Belcourt

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In a daisy field. In a garden. In a graveyard, in the sun,

its valley. In the sound of nothing. Your mother and father,

two trees in the distance. In the distance. In the sound of the whistle,

someone banishing you again. A hand in the distance, a greeting.

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In a greeting, a question. How old are you? Six? Seventeen?

In your body, ageing, an immediacy. In a flower, a new arm.

Eat the apple. Your lips redden. The person you were, you

are always becoming. Their breath spilling over your neck.

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A breath, a shore, a whistle, a knife. Where is the wind?

In love, the wounds you tend. A wound, a door, a lake, a fence.

Whatever is perpendicular to your becoming. Time is a terrible statue.

The tide will eat its skin. To prevent heartbreak, practise disappearing.

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All the eels are missing. You are an expert in missing. A mouth,

a lock, a gate, a key. Open your mouth and throw the word yet

into the river. Into the river, your face leaking glass. A face,

a flood, a crystal, a dove. Someday, you will be in love again.

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The sun, a wound on your windowsill. Light falls

on your dreams. It sounds like someone knocking.

Bilabial

after Myung Mi Kim

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murmur/murmured/murmuring

to separate the fire from the crackle

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meander/meandered/meandering

to find money on the sidewalk

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mourn/mourned/mourning

to drain the ocean from on...