2022 Posthumous Lifetime Achievement Award Kamilah Aisha Moon
Blending Heaven and Earth: Kamilah Aisha Moon’s “Furious Blooming”
“What is the imperative? Life!” — Sharan Strange
“I am life, and life loves life.” — Diane Ackerman
Of Blooming
Capaciousness defines the spirit of art, limited though we poets might be by the provinces of language and its logics. A keen tension exists between all we dare, or will ourselves, to know and express and what seemingly lies beyond our vatic capacity. Yet, this sublime contest between what might arise as artful revelation and what we must (or should) surrender to silence is the very matrix of poetry. All poets negotiate it; despite constraints, we urge ourselves toward a kind of reckoning, again and again, by means of our tenacious word-work. For some of us, too, given particular socially constructed obstacles, it feels like more a crucible than the basic wrestling of the artistic soul.
As I have stated elsewhere, what emerges from the inherently transformative impetus of African American poetry is a substantial model of empathetic discourse within American literature. Its humanistic affirmation appears repeatedly in figurative enactments of witnessing, nurturing, protecting, and manifesting. Such empathy and compassion permeate Kamilah Aisha Moon’s work, extending to everything in its range, that one senses her seeing All-in-Self, Self-in-All...all life’s suffering and yearning, our vulnerability and fulfillment inciting her vital meditations. In an emblematic poem in her first collection, She Has a Name, the symbolism creates a context of ripening and excess with which the speaker identifies:
To a Camellia Blossom
I saw your pretty head lying
beneath the bush. Without
thinking, I kneeled and cradled you, petals sighing
into grateful palms. Beauty face down
is an abomination. Why
must you suffer the weight
of early perfection? Your vividness
lifts me, lifts all. I wanted
to hold you. Just like that.
Until. I know this kind
of blooming well, to be
so lush, insides so swollen with life
that what was meant to hold you up
can’t. I wasn’t meant
to hold you, yet here we are
on this stray, brisk day in April
trembling and fulfilled, unlikely
and true. Before I knew what
to call you, I reached and imagined
season after season. Unmoored.
I feel very tender after reading such a poem; I experience this feeling frequently when reading Kamilah’s poems. So often, there is blooming and blossoming in them. From the opening stanza of the book’s first poem, “Borderless Country”—where children born with autism are “Souls we loved turned / like the faces of flowers thrust / toward a rogue sun”—and throughout She Has a Name, flowers, people, multifarious desires and hopes long to, and do, grow, blossom, and wither or perish only to regenerate and bloom again in various cycles. Most of the poems in the collection constellate around the poet’s autistic sister, giving Aisha’s contemplations and the family’s multiple perspectives on her sister’s experiences their most salient contours, mapping an ethic of Love (even as words sometimes fall away). In one poem, when her father speaks of “[holding] her high in the boughs of my biceps, / until her legs begin to grapevine / around mine / . . . / ... as long / as any father’s strength could stand her growing weight,” we understand this double-tongued metaphor for a complex, requisite love that patiently withstands growth.
Isn’t it always so with our fraught lives, Aisha seems to be reminding us in poem after poem. In “To a Jamaican Survivor with Love” (She Has a Name) the speaker counsels, “Seek the sun, / sweet daughter of Maroons— . . . // . . . You, a sturdy-petaled bloom / beneath howling sky.” Even the South has its roses that “bloom bright as blood” where the legacy of the Confederacy persists in stone monuments, in the calcification of cruel prejudices and hatred (“Eternal Stand,” Starshine & Clay). Yet in the closing stanzas of the final poem in She Has a Name, “A Superwoman Chooses Another Way to Fly,” the speaker rouses from a dream: “it’s always a choice, the angel spoke-sang / to be stronger than what pulls / us down . . . // “. . . i toss my crumpled sheet / like a discarded cape / and rise, shoulder blades / aching to split open and bloom.”
I see and hear in Aisha’s poetry resonant strains of poets whose work opened paths before her—Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde—as well as her contemporaries—sister-poets and kindred minds such as Natalie Díaz, Camille Dungy, Aracelis Girmay, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, and Tracy K. Smith, among others. In an elegiac and loving embrace of Griffiths in “Initiation” (in her second book, Starshine & Clay), she writes:
Your friend has entered the tribe
of those who’ve buried their mothers
& she is different—more of herself
than ever, but a new layer, the affect
of one unable to shake the sounds
of leaving, to unsee profound rising
preceding her own, waiting. ...
... Inducted into a society
of hurried truces & anointing
that becomes a steady hum
in the music of all things.
. . .
When mothers are planted,
daughters begin a furious blooming.
Again, blooming...coded language for the enduring sustenance sought, received, and given by women—family, friends, elders, literary foremothers—and here it recalls Brooks’s metaphor of the “furious flower,” its “blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind.”
After her own mother’s passing, Kamilah laments in “Disbelief”:
You, flowered
& shiny in what’s left
of my heart, teaching me
to rally. No matter
how it may appear,
I’m not rootless.
With quiet audaciousness, her poems—sites of rupture, desire, betrayal, loss, remembrance, jubilance, and resilience—restore both speaker and audience. As she exclaims in the ghazal “These Are the Breaks”:
... This is my story, my song—let me break
it down: I’ll glow with borrowed splendor, ripen
my soul day & night between clouds, break-
through wide & undeniable, fuse a new Aisha
with what remains, resists & refuses to break.
Exalted Sentience
Lucille Clifton remarked that poets must write out of “being in love with the world.” I think of it as a kind of exalted sentience or enlivened consciousness—the sense of “coming alive” that theologian Howard Thurman’s writings exhort us to...a spiritedness of being and capacious awareness found in probing, intelligent observation, profound regard of self and others, and beyond that, a sense of reverence for it all. This “inspirited-ness” engages and expands the energetic compass of everything one encounters even when in service of lament, complaint, and social or political response that no conscientious poet would eschew. This, too, is the alchemical quality of Kamilah Aisha Moon’s poetry.
Details of discernment underpin the poet’s craft because we see how much they—like mass, charge, and spin of matter’s elemental particles—govern fundamental aspects of its holistic workings. Kamilah’s observations—rendered in sometimes seemingly mundane details—indicate her deep understanding of, and robust attention to, the exigencies of the human condition. Her incisive poems always home in on what is most remarkable and essential.
In her astounding second collection, Starshine & Clay, particularly in the first section of the book, we encounter such details wedded to insight in numerous poems that confront the blight of injustice. For example, considering the posture of a man running away from a policeman before being shot in the back and killed allows a visceral understanding of what it means to negotiate U.S. social codes as a Black body:
Perfect Form
Walter Scott must have been a track athlete
before serving his country, having children:
his knees were high, elbows bent
at 90 degrees as his hands pumped
close to his sides, back straight & head up
as each foot landed in front of the other,
a majesty in his strides.
So much depends on instinct, ingrained
legacies & American pastimes.
Relays where everyone on the team wins
remain a dream. . . .
My guess is Mr. Scott ran distances
& sprinted, whatever his life events
required. Years of training & technique
are not forgotten, even at 50. Even after being
tased out of his right mind. Even in peril
the body remembers what it has been
taught (boy), keeping perfect form
during his final dash.
In other searing poems in that same section—“Angel,” “Samaria Rice, Tamir’s Mother,” “The Oak Tree’s Burden,” “The Accused’s Last Stand,” “Peeling Potatoes at Terezin Concentration Camp”—she depicts episodes of racist terror and brutality, and the anguish of survivors in the wake, highlighting the discomfiting yet necessary truth-telling of poets and our responsibility to look in all directions in time and space.
There and throughout her body of work, Kamilah animates poem after poem with the premise of human, animal, plant sentience...a unity of consciousnesses that even consecrates the talismanic energies of human-touched things:
Dust
Don’t move this dust—
my grandmother’s
scratched upright,
older than all of us,
has always anchored
this corner. . . .
. . .
Don’t budge our world
or move this dust,
don’t remind that
eventually, everything
goes slack
and mute as these keys
decaying golden-brown
in the mouth of her piano,
stringed mausoleum where
we prop our framed pasts.
. . .
Please, don’t
move this dust
that has danced in this air
for thousands of mornings,
our mingled skins
glitter caught in sunlight.
Invoking memory—perhaps the most significant marker of sentience given its symbiotic relationship with imagination (to borrow from Toni Morrison)—Kamilah argues for holding onto the “banged-up blessings” of what life bequeaths us, even those archives we may wish to abandon.
All Love
Still Life as Rocket: 42
This is the part where the boosters begin
to fall away, & I’m moving so fast
it feels like slow motion.
From here I can see
the blue contours of my journey
against eternal midnight lit
with torches held by unseen hands.
. . .
There is so much still launching
in me.
— Kamilah Aisha Moon
On the different occasions when I asked her to sign her books for me, Kamilah included among the phrasing “light” and “spirit and eye are sacred,” ending with “All love.” With those dedications, she magnetized words that perfectly characterized her and her poems, which even in their most personal and particular themes feel like dedications to our human collective, as they gather, assemble, classify, and honor what we can apprehend as primary and true. Poems that fulfill the impulse to unguard self and submit to wonder, bewilderment—or, put in the less eloquent, colloquial speech of social media, to simply convey: “I’m just going to put this right here.” (Or, more plainly still: Let these poems say what they say, do what they do.) The beautiful thing is that the best poetry never stops “saying,” and the potential audience for what is being offered can be infinite.
Kamilah’s poems ground and unmoor us, standing on something as solid as the earth’s (or the ancestors’) declared sovereignty, yet unbridled and reaching to “take cool, high-altitude breaths...” Attuned, like her muse Clifton, to the human and the divine as sources of struggle and joy, doubt or confusion and open-hearted curiosity, and, ultimately, ineffable certainties, her poems are channels for the rich workings of spirit that bridge both realms. Altogether, they comprise Kamilah’s field of “All Love,” encompassing deep bonds of family, friendship, sexual love, and, not least, fellowship with the natural world, the entire cosmos. Starshine & Clayends with a poem—and lines echoing Clifton—in which she reflects on such sweet communion:
Catskills Retreat
On a mountain all moonglow
toad moan & green majesty,
I’ve come (since it wouldn’t come to me)
to make peace at the foot of heaven,
haul it home somehow. The steepness
of my soul overwhelms housed
in this bear of a body.
. . .
I take cool, high-altitude breaths
& recall other heights, gaze
at humbling shoulders of earth
brushing up against brazen blue—
channel a lily-pad lightness upon
woman-made depths to face matters
long past skimming.
As fingers press prayers into
crumbling quartz, bless
my fellow travelers & the blades
of grass forgiving our steps, springing
back up. Bless the beaver beginning
again & again, the monarch’s
meandering flight. Bless these mosquitoes
& their insatiable thirst, the bluejays
at dawn trilling you are not through
O, Kamilah Aisha Moon, you are not through! Your voice continues to trill and thrum, its ethic of Love blossoming full-throated and true.
Notes
I have alternated the poet’s names throughout to acknowledge that while many in the literary world know her as Kamilah, to her family and closest friends, she is Aisha.
Most of the poems included here are in excerpted form and all, except “Disbelief,” can be found in her two published collections.
Sharan Strange
Kamilah Aisha Moon (1973-2021) was the author of Starshine & Clay (Four Way Books, 2017), a CLMP finalist featured on NPR's "All Things Considered" as a collection that captures America in poetry, and She Has a Name (Four Way Books, 2013), a finalist for both the Audre Lorde and Lambda Literary Awards. She also wrote a non-fiction chapbook On Nascency (2015).
Among her many interests, Kamilah enjoyed reading books from an early age. She developed a love of writing and poetry in high school, where she began working on two self-published chapbooks of poetry collections as she pursued her undergraduate studies. Kamilah Aisha earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in English at Paine College in Augusta, GA, and was employed at Hallmark Cards, Inc. in Kansas City, MO as a writer, where her work was featured in various card collections. After receiving a Masters in Fine Arts degree from Sarah Lawrence College, she also taught poetry and writing for various arts in education programs like Community-Word Project and the DreamYard Project. She was an adjunct professor at Medgar Evers College–CUNY, Drew University, and Adelphi University before eventually landing a tenure-track position at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia as an assistant professor of creative writing, where she taught until her passing in 2021.
A graduate fellow of Cave Canem's writers' retreat, she has received fellowships from MacDowell, Hedgebrook, Prague Summer Writing Institute, Vermont Studio Center, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, and the Rose O'Neill Literary House.
Kamilah once said, "Time marries experience to alter us in numerous ways as we interact with the world. The poems I write are receipts of these interactions, lyrical invoices that record the glories and costs of breathing." A Pushcart Prize winner and 2015 New American Poet, her poems and essays have been published widely, including in the Harvard Review, Poem-A-Day, World Literature Today, Jubilat, Sou'wester, Ecotone, Prairie Schooner, The New York Times, Oxford American, Boston Review, American Poetry Review, PBS Newshour, Buzzfeed, Adroit Journal, and in Best American Poetry 2019. She was featured nationally at conferences, festivals, and universities, including Furious Flower at James Madison University, the Library of Congress, and Princeton University.