Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Poem of the Week: Eduardo C. Corral

         
           
Cayucos
            boats used by African emigrants
            to reach Spanish islands 
A girl asleep beneath a fishing net
Sandals the color of tangerines
Off the coast of Morocco
A moonlit downpour, God's skeleton
Bark, dory, punt, skiff
"Each with a soul full of scents"
Day after day spent shaping
A ball of wax into a canary
Little lamp, little lamp
The word "contraband" arrived
In English in the 16th century via Spanish
Throw your shadow overboard
Proverbs, blessings scratched into wood
The tar of my country better than the honey of others 
-Eduardo C. Corral
From Slow Lightning (Yale University Press, 2012)
Used by permission.

Eduardo C. Corral is a CantoMundo fellow. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2012, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Quarterly West. His work has been honored with a "Discovery"/The Nation Award, the J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from Poetry, and writing residencies to the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. He has served as the Olive B. O'Connor Fellow in Creative Writing at Colgate University and as the Philip Roth Resident in Creative Writing at Bucknell University. Slow Lightning, his first book of poems, won the 2011 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. The recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, he currently lives in New York City.
Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!
If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.

No comments:

Post a Comment