Featuring Faculty Poets
Every April—National Poetry Month—QView shares work written by people who teach at Queens College. This week’s poems are by Kimiko Hahn and Roger Sedarat, members of the English department.
Seeing Someone Seeing
Someone with a cellphone camera
noticed a whale in the Buttermilk Channel
and clicked a shot of its aura,
just a random someone with a camera.
How often do we see phenomena--
a robin or turtle hatching? or an angel
of a child with a camera
capturing her whale in the Buttermilk Channel?
—Kimiko Hahn
(Published in Public Space, No. 29)
On Pleasing
Like echoes in a seashell
held gingerly to the ear,
bright as a mother and baby's please,
early memory is white canvas:
held gingerly for years
the baby laughs or sobs or sleeps.
Bright as a mother and baby's please
--remembered as peas and appease--
the baby laughs or sobs or sleeps and
sounds separate from noise to events,
remembered as peas and appease.
While she listens and hears
sounds separate from noise to events,
from blur to fidelity.
While the girl listens and hears
she recalls peas as appease.
Both blur and fidelity
echo in her seashell.
She recalls pleas and please
bright as her mother and her baby's peas.
—Kimiko Hahn
(Published in the New Yorker, January 2022)
To be a daughter and to have a daughter
can forecast at-odds relationships
especially when the mother hazards to write
on her own ours, what time's left
while keeping the baby safe
from herself as she and the baby wail
one in the crib, the other on the floor to wail
with the vacuum cleaner so the daughter
can't hear mama-drowning, so the new relationship
isn't all arithmetic and geometry, all right
angles barely connecting. What is left
at dusk, still tender and safe,
you couldn't pluck and lock in a safe--
not unlike a girl calf and her mama whale,
two generations of breaching daughters
applauded by tourists on a ship
but more likely, if they are right
whales, or what species are left
of those docile equatorial pods, never left
by men hunting their fat. They are not safe.
Larger than grays, smaller than blue whales,
mother and son or daughter
in their yearlong relationship,
are so buoyant that whalers called them the "right
whale to hunt." Funny, given the mariner's rite
to trick a man to think he'd been left
for the sharks without the safety
of pity or prayer--then that whaler would wail
for his own mother, wife, or daughter.
When it comes to daughter-mother relationships--
I've written on both till there's nothing left
without breaching safety, without whaling.
After all, I love daughters and I love ships.
—Kimiko Hahn
(Published in the New Yorker, March 2020)
Nowruz (Persian New Year)--Gallery VII in Dumbo, Brooklyn
Two hundred plus hipsters, ironic
Iranians in cowboy boots ignite
the spirit of Zoroastrian fire.
An artist breaks out of a cloth cocoon;
A country band plays old-country folk songs
and classic Brooklyn-western tunes.
Then poetry, projected on a wall:
a mix of old and new, a ghazal
with fill in the blank spaces. The crowd shouts
beloveds by name (sufi-punk babel).
Stop telling me New York’s sold itself out
and neighborhoods are gentrified chain stores.
There’s truth to it, yet riddle me this
postmodern royal court: cool Iranians
still making edgy retro art.
No modern Persian poet, not even
Sohrab Sephardi, could have positioned
the singer Mona, who happened to step
into the light projected from the van,
her silhouette framed by words of Hafez,
strands of her hair brushing through his verse:
Her light filled moon-face shone no more, she left.
What fleeting beauty upon a brick wall
beneath the moon above the Brooklyn Bridge,
as if finding New York for the first time
by practicing aesthetic rituals—
long forgotten rights of spring.
—Roger Sedarat
