Tuesday poem #668 : Farah Ghafoor : Excerpt from "The Last Poet in the World"

 

 

The critic sighs their minutes into hours and the writer wails so the editor takes down the review as the river clasps around their ankles and night crushes even the ants back into the earth and wind pesters the windows for an encore and the children are turned in their beds like good dough and the naked deciduous, finally alone, pity the human language and the stars imagine a life of decision and the moon performs its small vanities and the sedentary flocks do not think about the moon at all and the clouds hold their breath until they crumble and the crumpled mountains ache for their native rock and the machines stare with their long eyes into the enduring dark and the iceberg floats into a dreamless coma and the stories all begin and end on the same note of music.

Farah Ghafoor is the author of Shadow Price (House of Anansi, 2025). Selections of her debut poetry collection won the E.J. Pratt Medal and Prize in Poetry, and were finalists for the CBC Poetry Prize and the Far Horizons Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared in art exhibitions, magazines, and anthologies such as FACE/WASTE, The Walrus, and Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019), as well as post-secondary course syllabi. Raised in New Brunswick and southern Ontario, Farah resides in Tkaranto (Toronto) where she writes about the intersection of climate change, colonialism, and capitalism.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan