“The hurricane does not roar in pentameters.” –Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice
“Nearly goin’ blind, lookin’ for myself all over the place.” –Dolores Kendrick, The Woman of Plums
I was born in the heat of this electromania.
clasped hands of radios held in the
whirling sky
as we huddled on our verandah, (sandy, 2012)
searching for a voice, myself,
in these collapsed bronchioles of trees;
sand bags collected from harbour view, our past
mingled out by the coast;
our souls, windows, battered down with
plywood (beryl, 2023)
in wheezing rubble and ash,
stillwater and trampled churches, we visited
uncle keith’s farm in Darliston, it’s gone, we translated
the dialect of the aftermath, i am fluent
in it but i still keep dying this death (melissa, 2025)
Kaylee Smith ‘26 received the 2026 Lewis Sibley Poetry Prize for the most promising collection of original poems. This poem was among those submitted for the prize.
