Annotations for Speaker: Canisia Lubrin

That's right.

Thank you.

All right.

Furious flower.

You are beauty and bounty.

So are you boo.

Thank you so much, Lauren and Dr. Gabbin and everyone who has touched this momentous gathering in any way at all.

This will remain one of the great honors of my life.

I am going to read from a long poem, book length poem called The World After Rain.

And uh, Niyi said the word is rain in one of his poems just now.

It is a poem that exists for, to, and because of my mother.

And I dedicate it to those who mother everywhere.

I hold the mothers of Haiti and Palestine and Congo and Ukraine and Sudan, mothers in every single captive zone, anywhere.

Alive again under the red umbrella of the world.

Days I say to endings, exhaust all the living things sideways to nothing.

Such worlds to report to a dying friend, father, or brother, or water, mother.

What to know now, heaped life.

Coming again to this timetable of disproving globes, down and up under the blue umbrella of the world.

Singers still singing after the rain.

For dears, you look like life, fibers on revived surfaces.

And all this chirping, in between our easy hearts, we resemble first chances.

The smoke strong ghost polishing love with sharp embraces, with cleft hands softening the burning tissue of the mouth.

Gorging on exits that since our beginning would not speak of end here in my embrace.

Until your backbones crack, the mind can teach the hand to rattle open new jaws for counting days when what is left in this distance between two startling eyes

is the traffic of our watching slowing us bluing near rooms for atmospheric friends responsible to the haze.

Knowing enough medicine enough to call the burning world back to love.

It is time.

It is time harvesting hit and runs and mother hardening the ritual of doubtless love.

The time of houses unlit by grieving SOS's.

The room of my one life is full of the lights gone out.

In spite of all my protest, if I outline myself in nothing, now a time traveling letter to a daughter, is it that I have known the map, the maker

of it, the doors, the maker of them, and yet re-lettered near the last of time your trembling so endless.

Your minutes dispensed from the drugstore.

It is that I am static, stunned without a shovel.

In a time of damp soil, flooded deserts, the river that recollects us.

It is time again for rivers wounding down the vital pulse of undoing death.

You arrive on a piece of paper and ancient as rice, my nash of water meets your wood

smoke.

Your oven time.

Given more honest eyes, I would find more daylight to rest an ending from nights that do not end with nothing.

With exits or blood thinning into air.

Downloading strokes into this street between mothers' breasts.

Mothers bending.

Entering this bare room of astonishment is my form of worship.

With vowels like E that divides break, ending love, bookend and exile, beginning end, and everything.

She says, morning to everyone.

Give me your circles.

Promises for return.

Spells against conductors, against radiation.

Everybody knows that all the waters of the earth parts for Patricia Smith.