Celebrating Kwame Dawes

The following poem is taken from Kwame Dawes' and my forthcoming collection with Peepal Tree, Mortality. I post it here to celebrate Kwame's superb collection Sturge Town, originally published with Peepal Tree in the UK and out in August with Norton in the USA. I also celebrate his generosity of spirit in dialoguing with me about poetry and poetics over the last decade. Kwame's poetry works to offer ways through the contradictions and crises of physical existence while maintaining its role as witness. A complex sense of the spiritual shifts and aligns with both personal and collective timelines making it a deeply focussed engagement with self, family, 'place', music, literature, 'the arts', politics, friendship and communities.

49.

This is a day when your “being out there”
makes all the difference for me, Kwame.
    I read your poem and journey
with it, if not with you. I am not limited
to my own perceptions, care of your grace

and generosity. Your poems increase me
as prayer or contemplation does, and in
    other ways that transition across
language, across topographies 
and demographics. I see remarkable

things after reading them, disturbing
things after reading them, and follow
    the branching roots of each line
simultaneously. Sky, people, and earth.
Lives encountered and recounted.

And on this day when your “being out there”
makes all the difference, we here contemplate
    the months to come – said to be the worst
summer before it has even got fully under-
way. Each day we prepare until we are at its end.

We’ve known each other long enough now, Kwame,
to note the variations in repetitions, the way
    cycles loop over themselves and entangle.
We know the limits and incredible
expansiveness of action, and we know

each other’s atmospheres of mortality.
Every poem is a surprise and a confirmation.
    Every poem is the one that follows 
and starts our conversation over again.
This pattern holds it shape, then doesn’t.

    John Kinsella