FC senior grad Asiyah recited two original poems she wrote at the Mel King Institute breakfast. Read about her inspiration for writing them and listen to her beautiful work in the video below.
“I wrote the first poem which is untitled after Shirronda commissioned me to write a poem about food. Whenever I write poems I always want to leave the reader or listener with something to think about. In this poem, I decided to write about peaches, one of my favorite fruits but also trace them back to their origin. Similarly in Kindling, I trace my family's roots back to their origins, drawing analogies about how fire can burn and destroy but also bring new life.”
-Asiyah Herrera
Untitled
When I peach pick,
Sticky juices running down my chin,
Devouring, dusty skin and all,
the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
It seems nothing like a chore, and certainly nothing like labour.
Dollars are exchanged for the experience alone,
From blossom to blossom,
Row of laden boughs to
Nectar.
But away from here,
Pennies are exchanged for 12 hours,
With scarcity of water,
Dirt caked fingernails and exhaustion.
No sticky sweet nectar here,
Only salt dried on brown foreheads,
Remnants of old tears and sweat.
And there are days when I forget,
That the land was tilled by many brown hands,
There are days I forget,
Between bites of buttery
Crust,
Sugary syrup.
Between blossoms, impossibly sweet blossom to impossibly sweet blossom.
Kindling
My grandmothers kisses,
Taste like red lipstick
And black backs bleeding ghost stories,
Both blood and body,
Tree family tree.
Branches burning,
Ask me again where I’m from,
And I’ll tell you,
My ancestors walked here across the sea
Fresh off the boat yet so far from water.
Somehow,
I know they never knew they’d be buried in American soil.
That I, would never know of my roots
Never set foot on the dirt that raised me
Earth tended to carefully by brown hands
That mi abuelitos house would be empty,
And what is an empty house but a pile of firewood.
Ask me again where I’m from,
My family tree is making itself known to me one fragment at a time,
Upon an unearthing of bones after cremation. It’s remembering Spanish,
Syllable by syllable,
It’s Martin Luther king jrs “I have a dream”
It’s learning Japanese stroke by stroke,
It’s burning,
Cinders and smoke
Branches ablaze.
Like my great great grandfathers house,
Who’s remains served as a blacked coffin
And left none but an orphaned Japanese boy behind.
That he soon started a new life in America.
It’s burning,
Like the fire that set my grandmother's house in mattapan aflame.
But that the insurance paid for her antiques to be reupholstered.
It’s burning.
That wood burning always ends in rebirth,
Like a Forest after a wildfire.