Poems by Zakia Carpenter-Hall 

I Had a Moment of Wanting to Leave the Cycle of Rebirth
 
Because my surroundings kept spinning as the noes
were piling up, I was through with living inside
of Keats’ Negative Capability. I could see little flecks 
of light in front of my eyes and a dark orb 
 
in my lower periphery. I had to watch out for blurriness 
or double vision, in which quadrant of the eye 
I sensed muscle spasms. When I studied Hinduism, 
I made an artists’ book, and I always think there’s more 
 
inside of that devotional text. As many times 
as I have looked at my creation story, I can only 
ever remember the first two pages, the AUM. 
It’s almost as if I should have handled the book 
 
like a mandala, creating it to destroy it, in order 
to turn the work back into artless granules — 
to convert the work back into sand. How quickly 
I learned Sanskrit and then forgot it, thrilled 
 
there was this veil called maya that I had to learn 
to see through, the moment the small rake 
erased the circle’s edge — I wept — knowing 
the monks had spent days making the mandala, 
 
siphoning coloured sand into intricate patterns.
And sometimes the work feels like sand, as if trying 
to walk cross the beach in tennis shoes, the work 
draws you back into it, you can’t go too quickly, 
 
(the ubiquity of it), one has to go through sand 
to get to the sea, you can build with it, but 
the structures aren’t meant to last, and what is sand, 
but defecated coral once processed in the gut 
 
of a parrot fish, sometimes it’s shells or rocks 
that the alkaline water has worn away, 
the sifting foundation of an ecosystem, evidence 
of a metropolis drawing in what it cannot have.  
 
 
 
 
 
 
A Quiet Upheaval
               
-After ‘Syria by the Sea, 1873’
 
as if
the monument wandered there, 
a seed of Mesopotamia and bloomed…
I can see it in the largest pillar, 
the whole column 
fluted like bark, nodes, and grown branches             
against a long panel of moss on this northern side, 
its lichen dark as rust and these ruins
near the Mediterranean coast. 
I felt a flurry
of hands all over my column frame               
locking me into place as I watched  
my body being formed, segment by segment,
a play of light and shadow on the ground, worried 
that those people, who
fashioned my existence, might be crushed 
under my grandeur, what they saw in me
this landscape
that I tower over, these hills
embossed in gold sunlight,
how it refracts across my curvature.
I had believed such work 
would take blood --
that I’d never be fully made.
While others
in my sanctuary toppled rod-like and broke 
into shards, I was hopeful
that my marble may grow soft as callouses
or a person’s wilting frame,
the way their soft flesh began 
to hang loosely from their bodies,
like no pliancy I’d ever known
as I learned to anticipate 
my own becoming.
 
 
 
 

Zakia Carpenter-Hall is an American writer, tutor and critic living in the UK. Her poetry reviews and poems have both been published in Poetry Wales, The Poetry Review, Wild Court, Magma and elsewhere. Human Ecologies (2021) is her ecopoetry film commissioned by The Scottish Poetry Library in partnership with Africa in Motion (AiM) Film Festival and Obsidian Foundation. She was the editorial intern for Magma 82 Obsidian, a former Poetry London mentee, Jerwood Bursary Recipient and London Library Emerging Writer. Her poetry pamphlet Into the same Sound Twice is forthcoming in April 2023 with Seren. 


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