Now What

Poem
Authored by
30 April, 2022
soybean plants growing up through a crack in the soil on a soybean farm

I think this is the first poem of Sharif's I've read.

Her use of the word relief made me go look it up in a dictionary to learn all its meanings.

I can't remember the last time I read about tanners; it reminds me of learning about Butcher Town in San Francisco, a neighborhood and a time I've come across only rarely in reading about the history of the city.

The quick, almost abrupt ending is such a shift from the rest of the poem, that long history and then sudden (but also long, just compressed) change.

 

photo of soy field by Andrea Pavanello, Milano., CC BY-SA 3.0 IT , via Wikimedia Commons