May Today Be Awake
Back in January, I shared Meghana and Chetan Junnuru’s poem “May,” a poem that ends with the all-too-salient line: “May tomorrow be awake with the touch of zero.” It has become something like a sonnet for Unrestricted writers, a linguistic handshake that passes from student to student, each making the poem their own in some unexpected way. Today I’d like to share some of these further iterations of “May,” launched into flight like anaphoric prayers toward tomorrow.
The first comes from Kaiser, one of my mentorship students at the South Education Center. Kaiser, who is given to drawing glorious word maps, doesn’t produce autonomous speech, but answers in a soft and lyrical trill when he can. After our physical meetings at school were shifted to the digital realm, it took us a couple of weeks to connect. I missed Kaiser’s gentle presence, his practice of taking my hand in his after he’d finished a poem, a quiet gratitude. So when we finally connected and Kaiser made the Junnuru May his own, it filled me with immense joy.
Birdsong woke me up early this morning and I lay in bed thinking about line from another poem, written by my newest student Sid Ghosh: “May today be awake / with the living river / of phantoms of my thoughts.” We started working together just this week and Sid, a twelve-year-old nonspeaking poet with both autism and Downs, wasted no time in revealing his prodigious vision and lyrical instincts.
His May poem bursts with abundance, redolent with the “million poems” contained within his vibrant mind.
Notice how Sid builds connective tissue through assonance: smell/million, sight/mine, touch/love, living/river, thoughts/lots/promised. Imane Boukaila, introduced to The Listening World a couple weeks ago, similarly injects her May poem with a flood of assonance mixed with alliteration, mindfully messing with the way language carries meaning.
And finally, I offer you a May from one of Imane’s intermittent collaborators, Adam Wolfond, whose work we have celebrated here more than once.
These writers are people who may, who may together, and who may pace in a way that helps everyone adapt to the present disequilibrium. May today be awake with a larger sensorium, brought to life by neurodivergent writers. And may tomorrow be awake with their mindful mastery.
More Awake than Ever,
Chris