Kartika_Issue15

TREE RISINGS
Purvi Shah
ISSUE 15 | SPRING 2013
In the secret garden, brushed behind city streets, you climb
a short tree. I, in a catch-me-now skirt, float
across branches, dangle uncut legs, reactivate
muscles & silent bruises decades hushed.
You inform me, with your four-year prowess,
which branch is stable, which foot leads, which foot
clasps.
You convince me I have forgotten
what it is to fall.
At four or forty, a man carves space
to temporarily hold, to grapple
with which footing will reach first horizon.
At four or nearer to forty, I gaze to the sun-burnt
brush of grass & scatter of sharp stones & sigh – still rising
as these bones blossom, – unshorn & more sturdy in view of break.
Purvi Shah believes in the miracle of poetry and the beauty of change. Winner of the
inaugural SONY South Asian Social Services Award in 2008 for her work fighting
violence against women, she also directed Together We Are New York, a
community-based poetry project to highlight the voices of Asian Americans during
the 10th anniversary of 9/11. She writes to plumb migration and loss, including
through her first book, Terrain Tracks (New Rivers Press, 2006), which was
nominated for the Asian American Writers’ Workshop Members’ Choice Award in
2007. In 2010 she received a Travel & Study Grant from the Jerome Foundation to
explore sound vibration and meaning in Sanskrit and how sound energy can translate
through poetry in English. Her work has been published in numerous journals and
anthologies including Descant, Drunken Boat, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Indivisible,
The Literary Review, The Massachusetts Review, Nimrod, and Weber Studies. You
can find more of her work at http://purvipoets.net,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/purvi-shah, or @PurviPoets.
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