Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
The Hovel
Slate-scraps, split stone, third-hand splintering timber; rusted nails and
sheet-tin;
dirt floor, chinks the wind seeps through, the stink of an open sewer
streaming behind;
rags, flies, stench, and never, it seems, clear air, light, a breeze of
benevolent clemency.
My hut, my home, the destiny only deferred of which all I live now is
deflection, illusion:
war, plunder, pogrom; crops charred, wife ravished, children starved,
stolen, enslaved;
muck, toil, hunger, never a moment for awareness, of song, sun, dawn’s
immaculate stillness.
Back bent, knees shattered, teeth rotting; fever and lesion, the physical
knowledge of evil;
illiterate, numb, insensible, superstitious, lurching from lust to hunger to
unnameable dread;
the true history I inhabit, the sea of suffering, the wave to which I am
froth, scum.
C. K. Williams was an acclaimed American poet and translator. He won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Flesh and Blood (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987), the National Book Award for The Singing (FSG, 2003) and the Pulitzer Prize for Repair (FSG, 2000). He taught in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University.
His poem “A Hundred Bones” from AGNI 72 was chosen for The Best American Poetry 2011.