Poetry reading by Patricia Smith
Tuesday, March 23
7 PM, Bucknell Hall, on the campus of Bucknell University
Patricia Smith is the author of Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press, 2008), a poetic chronicle of the physical and emotional toil of Hurricane Katrina.
KATRINA
I was birthed restless and elsewhere
gut dragging and bulging with ball lightning, slush,
broke through branches, steel
I was bitch-monikered, hipped, I hefted
a whip rain, a swirling sheet of grit.
Scraping toward the front of you, hungering for wood, walls,
unturned skin. With shifting and frantiv mouth, I loudly loved
the slow bones
of elders, fools, and willows.
