The Unknown Flower and the Feather Crow
This week we bring you another post from Sagirah Shahid!
I was a fan of Saysha’s writing before we met in the summer of 2019. I voiced a poem she had written about a dancing mermaid during an Unrestricted Interest book launch and was instantly mesmerized by the enchanting whimsy of Saysha’s writing. When I was invited to work with Saysha one-on-one at the South Education Center the following fall, I was thrilled to meet this talented writer. Saysha’s poetry leans into the imaginative. She has this knack for world building that wraps you around her masterful finger.
Sometime during the 2019-2020 school year, Saysha and I read Tracy K. Smith’s “Flores Woman.” In the poem, Tracy writes an imaginative poem from the point of view of a small woman from 18,000 years ago. I asked Saysha what she thought it would be like to wake up in the environment of the Flores Woman. In response Saysha wrote “The Unknown Flower and the Feather Crow.”
I love the way Saysha makes the environment its own lively character in this poem. Everything is teeming with quiet suspense and a bit of beautiful danger even. The last two lines of this poem rattle me to the core every time I read it. That longing to do more than survive, the distant danger of the crow, the drama of it all---demands the reader take in the impossible duality of the world: where there is renewal there is the opposite of that. Somehow, that tension establishes a kind of beauty that makes us appreciate the complexities of the world we live in.
Saysha’s poem is part of her fierce second collection Floating Carriage. Read it and get whisked into Saysha’s poetry.