Craft as Crossing
[CW: Xenophobia, Transphobia, Bigotry]
Mar 27, 2026 · 1 min read
Craft as Crossing
After Noor Hindi
It doesn’t matter whether English forms
like sonnets penned by missionaries leech
into the robes and drums and cross my fore
fathers filtered through their own; soon they teach
Victorian proselytizers’ boxes of hate
as if that cross will emboss our shore against the maw
of the Atlantic we’ve fed carbon dioxide,
as if the hawks across the shallows won’t hem and haw
at the audacity of us fleeing
for dry land. It doesn’t matter whether the French
villanelle would swell, a natural spiral
to gyre with the cyclone the hawks bring
all the way home. It doesn’t matter when
My youngest brother is a phrase I use
only within certain ports. It doesn’t
matter when they
crave to cross
us all
out.
Comments (4)
Great poem, I wonder what it would look like in the language the English tried to drive out. While studying in Ireland, I learned about the effort to reclaim Irish language, as young people had stopped learning it long ago, and the residents in Cork where I lived felt shame at that fact. These young people want to take their culture back. Now road signs use Irish and English in a hierarchy that makes sense for their geography. I love your enjambments, like leaping from a cliff and hoping there’s something to land on, especially the ones at the end of the stanza. I came up writing prose, so this technique is something I’m learning, can you tell me a bit about your decisions when breaking lines?