Elegy by Aracelis Girmay

Today a poem by Aracelis Girmay, an American poet whose work I found a year or two ago via Poetry magazine and was blown away.

Elegy

by Aracelis Girmay

What to do with this knowledge that our living is not guaranteed?

Perhaps one day you touch the young branch

of something beautiful. & it grows & grows

despite your birthdays & the death certificate,

& it one day shades the heads of something beautiful

or makes itself useful to the nest. Walk out

of your house, then, believing in this.

Nothing else matters.

All above us is the touching

of strangers & parrots,

some of them human,

some of them not human.

Listen to me. I am telling you

a true thing. This is the only kingdom.

The kingdom of touching;

the touches of the disappearing, things. 

From Kingdom Animalia.  © 2011 | BOA Editions, Ltd

___

About the poet: Aracelis Girmay was born and raised in Santa Ana, California. She received a BA from Connecticut College in 1999 and went on to earn an MFA in poetry from New York University. Her poetry collections include Teeth (2007), Kingdom Animalia (2011), (BOA Editions, 2011), winner of the Isabella Poetry Award and a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Award, and The Black Maria (2016), named a “Top Poetry Pick” by Publisher's Weekly, O Magazine, and Library Journal. She is also the author of the collage-based picture book changing, changing (2005). In 2011 Girmay was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and in 2015 she received a Whiting Award for Poetry. A Cave Canem Fellow and an Acentos board member, she led youth and community writing workshops. She currently teaches at Hampshire College. She lives in New York City.

Also, though I am not flooding these posts this month, as is my wont, with multiple links to interviews and reviews of the poet's work, I am going to make an exception today and add an excerpt from an interview with Arecelis Girmay:

Several of your poems deal with your name—the letters that compose it and its pronunciation. Do you know the history and meaning of your first and last names? And what does it mean for you to write about them?I like this question: how it is a way of talking about family and history and colonialism and dreams without nationalism (in this case), which is striking to me. Too, what people name their children and how names can mean, is just so interesting. It speaks so much to cultural and personal imagination and the moment of one’s birth. 

Aracelis—which is most familiar when I write it lowercase—aracelis—it’s a Spanish clearly rooted in Latin and means “altar of the sky” or, as I was told when I was little, “altar of heaven.” I prefer sky and have always had trouble with “heaven” as a religious term that seemed to bring with it, in my mind, eternal hell. 

When I think of the history of my name, I think of the Basilica de Santa Maria de Aracoeli in Rome—which I happened upon, by total accident, when I was just 20. In this church, people would pray to the Santa Bambino who people believed could heal the terminally ill and raise people from the dead. I hadn’t even heard of the Santa Maria de Aracoeli before and didn’t know then the Latinate roots of my name. The church is said to have been built on the ruins of the temple of the ancient Roman goddess Juno—who was said to be, among other things, the protector of the women of Rome. Part of what’s interesting to me about this—a name as poem or as text—is that my last name is Tigrinya, and, if we remember, the Italians, in the spirit of conquest and the scramble for colonies, brutally colonized Eritrea. (Every colonization is brutal in its way—I say “brutally” in this context not to say something special about colonization but to de-sanitize the word.) And so, these two names hold in them this strangeness and death and beauty and surprise. 

There has been, on my mother’s side, an ongoing argument about where the accent goes. For a while my name was spelled “Aracelís”—but I, along the way, chose the traditional/popular pronunciation (with the implied accent on the “e”).  

My great-grandfather offered the name up to my mother, for me. 

My last name, Girmay, is my father’s first name. When it’s all lowercase, it feels most familiar—mainly because my dad has theneatest handwriting and he writes in all lowercase letters and his “g” looks like it is typed. Something familiar and marvelous and home. But, yes, it’s my father’s first name. That’s how it works in Tigrinya. And I’ve always had trouble understanding, exactly, the translation of the name. My sister says it’s like being named “my majesty” but that’s so Latinate and English. My dad says that’s not it at all. From what he explains, “Girmay” is something you would say to someone who you utterly respect. Like calling someone “greatness” or “honor.” Really, I think it shows a kind of hope for my father that my grandparents had. He says that the best translation is that his parents named him “my charisma” or “my honor.” He would be their charisma, their honor. He also says that his father used to call him the equivalent of “be honor” when he was younger. So imagine that’s your name? Being addressed or named by the hope others have for you. Might a name be the first ode? 

My first name is so Spanish and my last name so Tigrinya. And the rules of pronunciation shift halfway. Meaning, Spanish speakers often pronounce the “g” of “girmay” as “h” and Tigrinya speakers will put more wind in the “r” of my first name. My name is a kind of river that switches directions, quickly.