Radioactive Starlings: Poems

By Myronn Hardy

From an award-winning poet, a collection that explores the complexities of transformation, cultures, and politics

In Radioactive Starlings, award-winning poet Myronn Hardy explores the divergences between the natural world and technology, asking what progress means when it destroys the places that sustain us. Primarily set in North Africa and the Middle East, but making frequent reference to the poet’s native United States, these poems reflect on loss, beauty, and dissent, as well as memory and the contemporary world’s relationship to the collective past.

Hardy imagines the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa as various starlings dwelling in New York City, Lisbon, Tunis, and Johannesburg, flying above these cities, resting in ficus and sycamores and on church steeples and minarets. Inhabiting the invented voices of Gwendolyn Brooks, Bob Kaufman, and Henry Ossawa Tanner, the poems make references to Miles Davis, Mahmoud Darwish, Tamir Rice, Ahmed Mohamed, and Albert Camus, and use forms such as ghazal, villanelle, pantoum, and sonnet, in addition to free lyricism. Through all these voices and forms, the questing starlings persist, moving and observing—and being observed by we who are planted on a crumbling ground.

A meditation on the complexities of transformation, cultures, and politics, Radioactive Starlings is an important collection from a highly accomplished young poet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Sep 8, 2017
• ISBN: 9781400888764

Book preview

PESSOA AS STARLING: NEW YORK CITY

Everything up climbing up granite steel.

A poet cries chrysanthemums. A vase

breaks in Harlem on Lenox before meals

are served to nuns opal beads quick as lace

through conical fingers. A black feather falls

in black hair. His father has black hair sunned

brown in groves where I flew. Poems in groves walled

in loose stones but the poet needed the gun.

The father to send his sighing son to

the city’s sighing streets where black women

saunter sing carry vases of water

sometimes salty sometimes fresh. This given

to the poet unconsciously conscious

of riots the street the body conscious.

FAILURE

Leaves burn above our heads

yet our hair remains unsinged black

as jackdaw.

This crispness this air more

like quince. I have failed miserably.

I have failed you in this

season of colorful death.

How it falls in streets

pounded smooth.

In piles where I played as a boy.

Auburn joy now like

the burning of skin.

Who could have known me this way?

This failed man wandering after

the act after the explosion.

The parachute wide as wilderness dragging.

This wilderness where

I reach for you.

REFUGEES

Read of refugees wound in acrylic blankets.

Wandering on a hill without walls walls

to claim the blast of walls regulatory

in that place those places returning to loose

mineral crimson oyster clouds.

Train stations cloistered but they aren’t there.

No acrylic blankets in circles tubes stuffed

with the fat of echoes undissolvable despite

the vastness of cerulean.

The graves they have will

exchange for others.

They are not here. You are told they are not here

but you read this several times saw the photographs.

Not here.

Not here now.

Wandering always wandering.

In Amman a train to Damascus you almost take

but are asked Why? Asked of family.

It is gone the man who might be

something else says. Something

of pearl something of dust returned.

Turn from this train.

No dust yet.

Not now.

Sandstone where rivers rubbed red smooth red.

See this wanderer.

See this.

ORPHEUS ESCAPES WITH TURTLE

Turtle is the audience.

Chords reverberate in the dome a pattern

of hexagons. How the luthier

stopped breathing after laying

strings the Alhambra behind him.

But Orpheus doesn’t know this

in that shambolic room neither

the girls who left lace on the floor.

But turtle knows.

Had been there cold on symmetric tiles.

Felt the thump. Knew the cooling would be quick.