Currently reading: Wild Embers by Nikita Gill

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For about three months, I’ve been juggling a few works of poetry. Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong; Up Jump the Boogie by John Murillo; and most recently Wild Embers by Nikita Gill which I immediately took to.

Now as you might guess, I didn’t finish any yet but I can already tell I’ll appreciate their final masterpieces. Each of the three represents, but not reduced to, a different pair of eyes to separate cultures.

So with Night Sky we’ve got a Vietnamese-born migrant who writes of family, grief, war, and love with overwhelming cadence at times, however, at other times pretty vague (for poetry I dare say) that I can’t begin to guess what I’m supposed to take from it. Again, I’m not finished so this is all subject to change. I discovered him when I came across his poem ‘Someday I Will Love Ocean Vuong‘ on The Yorker and I was hooked on the flow of words from one cleverly crafted concept to the next, and more importantly, the gentle cry of the message on self-love.

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Poem: Meaning

i read somewhere,

that your purpose is

to give your life meaning

Clever, i’d thought then

now, never a truer thing I saw

It’s all experience, hands-on

full throttle even when time

moves at a snail’s pace

It’s a real thing, to have died

and still, be breathing, limbs moving

It was/is my experience living on this edge

To know what it means

to have a freezer-burned soul

The thaw promised growth and healing

What’s good for me was not for the polar bear

Scattered around my body

are holes i dug with my

bare fingers

Like from the earth my mother came

ivy and moss flank the trellis of my ribs

to hold myself to me,

Perhaps, i realize, not so i did not fall apart

but to contain the new thing I become

each time i change

into the thing i’m supposed to be

i know what it means to

sit quietly at dawn and to

let the dew bathe me