My name is Podrigotuma and poetry for me is not an escape from the world but an embrace

of it.

Poetry isn't the final end in and of itself.

Poetry is a way to open myself up to being alive in the world and my body and in my words

and in my mind.

The New Religion by Chris Abani.

The body is a nation I have not known.

The pure joy of air, the moment between leaping from a cliff into the wall of blue below,

like that, or to feel the rub of tired lungs against skin covered bone like a hand against

the rough of bark like that.

The body is a savage, I said.

For years I said that.

The body is a savage as if this safety of the mind were virtue not cowardice.

For years I have snobbed the dark rub of it, said, I am better, Lord, I am better.

But sometimes in an unguarded moment of sun I remember the cow-dung scent of my childhood

skin thick with dirt and sweat and the screaming grass.

But this distance I keep is not divine.

For what was Christ if not God's desire to smell his own armpit?

And when I see him I know he will smile fingers glued to his nose and say, next time I will

send you down as a dog to taste this pure hunger.

I love this poem for the way in which he explores his own relationship with his body and

tells us really that there's been a distance in him between his mind and the way his mind

...